Guess Who's Coming to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  That was a good point. “Folks said she was feeling lousy. Do you think she could have been poisoned, maybe was too weak to resist?”

  She shrugged. “We all ate the refreshments. Besides, I don’t think she got any. And while I like Wilma as a killer, why should she poison Willena there when she could do it at home?”

  Since those points had occurred to me, too, I didn’t pursue them. I could call Charlie later to remind him to have the forensics people look for evidence of poison. Right now I wanted to talk with MayBelle about her own qualifications as a suspect for Willena’s murder.

  “Speaking of Wilma, she said you bought some land from her for a park, but then you decided to put a subdivision on it, so Willena notified the county commission that it is wetlands to block you from building there.”

  MayBelle gave a little snort of laughter. “That’s what Wilma wants to believe now. I told her all the time I wanted to build Brandison Park down there, and she knew as well as I did that Brandison Park would be a subdivision. Do I ever build parks?” She didn’t wait for me to answer that, because we both knew she didn’t. “But after she had my check in her pocket, she had second thoughts. Claimed she’d be able to see the roofs from her back windows, and she didn’t want a subdivision that close to her house. She called and told me to give her money back, but I refused. So she called Willena, and that’s when Willena called the commission to tell them I was planning a subdivision on wetlands.”

  “Are you?” I couldn’t help asking.

  She shrugged. “Possibly. But Willena was being obstreperous. She knew well and good that all I have to do is swap off some other land for that parcel.”

  “How do you move the raccoons, fish, and tadpoles?”

  She exhaled a derisive little puff of air. “We hire a moving van. Come off it, Mac. It’s standard procedure, and Willena knew that. A little time and money, and I’ll get my variance and a permit to build. She wasn’t any threat to me, so I had no motive to kill her.”

  As I looked at her proud profile, the nose high and hooked like some Middle Eastern princess, I reflected that developers these days are like judges and lawyers back during Prohibition, who spent the day convicting people of buying and selling liquor and then went home to secret rooms where they could drink in private. Some folks firmly believe that rules and regulations apply to everybody but them.

  “Did you hear that Nancy Jensen has been arrested?” I asked, to see her reaction.

  Her face lit with amusement tinged with admiration. “Now there’s somebody who could think she had a motive to kill Willena, the way Horace was carrying on with her at that dance. She didn’t have the sense to see that for what it was.”

  “She wasn’t arrested for killing Willena. She was arrested for shooting a gun into a motel room. She claims she was trying to scare the people inside.”

  MayBelle gave a wicked chuckle deep in her throat. “By which I guess you mean Sadie Lowe and Horace? If Nancy’s going to start shooting up all the motel rooms those two inhabit, we won’t have a decent room left in the county.”

  I stared at her in surprise. “You knew about them?”

  “Half the people in town know about them. They—” She broke off and swore. Then she jerked the wheel again, to drive across the field toward a clump of men who looked like they were surveying for utility lines. She screeched to a stop and muttered, “Give me a minute. I’ll be right back.” She swung down from the driver’s seat and strode angrily to where the men had stopped work and were watching her apprehensively.

  I was glad for a chance to let my bones resettle. Whatever she said, a couple of men cringed and picked up their equipment to move over a few feet. I watched her with the same mixture of respect and distaste I feel for an army tank.

  MayBelle’s daddy had been a carpenter for Big Jim Brandison, who owned a small construction company—Big Jim’s—in town. When MayBelle graduated from high school, Big Jim’s wife, Bonita, offered to let her work in the office until she found a better job. Talk about inviting a rattle-snake into your home! At that time Bonita handled all the office side of the business, but MayBelle was so efficient that by fall, Big Jim suggested that Bonita take it easy and let MayBelle run things. In those days Big Jim built houses from four basic plans, making the changes each owner requested. Folks used him because he had a reputation for being honest and fair in his prices. By Christmas MayBelle had persuaded Big Jim to offer his clients a wider selection of floor plans. They were such a success that he had to increase his crews.

  After that, there was no stopping the woman. She set out to learn anything there was to know about the building trade, until Jim started bragging that she knew as much as he did. He was so proud of her that at Jimmy and MayBelle’s wedding, if you hadn’t known the families, you’d have had a hard time figuring out whether Big Jim was the father of the groom or the bride.

  Poor Jimmy, he was a tall, lanky drink of water six years MayBelle’s senior, with his mama’s sweet nature. Jimmy never wanted to be a builder, but he didn’t want to fuss with his daddy and didn’t have a clear idea of what he would rather do. I’m not sure he ever wanted to marry MayBelle, either. I’d always suspected he simply didn’t know how to get out of it when his daddy depended on her so much.

  When Big Jim dropped dead of a heart attack five years after Jimmy and MayBelle got married, Bonita and Jimmy talked about selling the business. She wanted to move to Florida, and he thought he would like to try to become a pro golfer. Jimmy loved golf and played real well.

  MayBelle had a conniption. Next thing we knew, she and Jimmy had bought out Bonita’s part of the business, renamed the company Brandison Builders, and branched out into real estate development. Their first two subdivisions were modest and sold quickly as starter homes, but modesty was foreign to MayBelle’s nature. She next persuaded the bank to lend them an amount of money that made Jimmy hyperventilate whenever he thought about it. With that money she bought land adjoining the country club golf course and built several large houses that would have fit right into a wealthy Atlanta suburb. Nobody thought they’d sell in Hopemore, but MayBelle convinced some of our up-and-coming young couples that hers was the best place to live in town. She used her profits to build more big houses, and to convince young professional couples to buy more house than they needed or could afford. She also persuaded our chamber of commerce to market our great Middle Georgia weather to retirees from the North until pretty soon, lo and behold, MayBelle had several retirement subdivisions around two new eighteen-hole golf courses.

  Before we knew it, Hope County was dotted with Brandison subdivisions, MayBelle had moved into commercial development, and she was expanding like a plague into neighboring counties. These days Brandison Builders was the biggest developer in the region and one of our major employers. Over the past fifteen years, MayBelle had taken over most of the business. She negotiated for land, arranged loans, designed houses, bossed the crews, and packaged and advertised the developments. Jimmy mostly played golf and seemed embarrassed by his wife’s success — or was it her steamroller tactics?

  Nobody ever knew exactly why things came to a head. Was it Bonita getting frail and asking Jimmy for money to move into a nice retirement community near Orlando? Or Jimmy winning enough golf tournaments that year that he decided he was ready to try the pro circuit? He was always reticent about his personal business, and all anybody heard from MayBelle was that, “If I’d let him, Jimmy would spend money like water.” For whatever reason, that past winter, Jimmy had filed for divorce.

  MayBelle didn’t mind losing Jimmy. Some folks doubted she remembered what he looked like. But she claimed she deserved ninety percent of the business, since she’d built it up. Jimmy pointed out to the judge that since Georgia is a common-property state, and it was his and his daddy’s business before she ever joined it, MayBelle wasn’t entitled to more than half. He also argued that since the Brandisons’ good name was on the business, and the foundation of its success was his pare
nts’ hard work and reputation for honesty, his mother deserved compensation if MayBelle planned to continue using the name. When MayBelle vigorously objected, Jimmy described right there in front of God and everybody the inadequate settlement MayBelle and he had given Bonita when she moved to Florida. The whole community was shocked. Jimmy took half the blame for that, but nobody — including the judge — doubted that MayBelle had been the one to insist on not giving Bonita more.

  Needless to say, Miss MayBelle wasn’t about to lose any part of the business she could hold on to, so we had some pretty scrappy courtroom scenes around here for a few months. Finally Jimmy offered to give her sixty-five percent of the business and sell her the rest if she would pay his mama five hundred thousand dollars for the rights to the Brandison name. That ought to let Bonita live in comfort the rest of her life.

  Since then, MayBelle had taken any opportunity to complain about how poor she was now that she was having to buy her own business, and how you couldn’t make as much in Hope County as you could up in Atlanta. Jimmy went around smiling like a man who’d been reprieved from death row.

  As I watched MayBelle stomp back to the Land Rover, I almost felt sorry for her. Folks respected her — after all, she knew better than most how to turn Georgia clay to gold—but I couldn’t think of a single person who really liked her. More than one called her Miss Kudzu, meaning she might have once been an economic necessity, but now folks wished they knew how to get rid of her.

  She climbed into her seat with her face flushed but without the frown line she used to have between her eyebrows. “One more crisis averted. Fools were about to put the water line right under a whole row of houses instead of beside the street. You have to watch them every minute, Mac, or they make a mess of things.” On and on she went, complaining about folks who were working hard for her under the hot Georgia sun while she reaped most of the profits.

  I really hadn’t planned to fuss at her, though, until we splashed back across the creek and up the bank between two magnificent triple poplars she had slated for destruction. “Did you flunk biology?” I demanded.

  She’d been in my son Ridd’s class all the way through school, so I expected at least raised eyebrows. Instead she laughed. “No, that was chemistry. Ridd tried to help me, but I was hopeless. Why?”

  “Maybe you missed the unit on ‘The Trees Are Our Friends.’ The one where they talk about what trees do for us.”

  “We’ll be putting trees in later,” she assured me, flicking one hand like she was a fairy godmother who could raise towering oaks with a wave of her wand. “Magnolias, dogwoods, maples, even a few oaks. The dogwoods look real pretty, and magnolias and live oaks are what Northerners think of when they move south.”

  “Magnolias and live oaks take up more yard room than you’re allotting whole houses,” I told her bluntly. “Most of them will have to be taken out within twenty years. Why don’t you just keep the trees you already have and work around them? At these prices, the owners deserve a tree.”

  “Oh, twenty years.” She sounded like I’d said a hundred. “Until then, they’ll shade the porches real good.” She sounded utterly disinterested. “I’m going to put wide front porches on these houses, so folks can sit out at night with their neighbors.”

  “Considering how close you’re gonna build them, they can sit out and spit on their neighbors.”

  I thought that would rile her, but she laughed. “If that’s what they want to do, it’s fine with me.” She turned the wheel, and from our new angle I got a glimpse of the bulldozer up near the road, finishing off the silver maple.

  I tried another tack. “Like you said, I know more about trees than you do, and trees don’t merely shade porches, they cool the whole atmosphere. They also produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide we breathe out. What do you reckon we’ll breathe when you developers have cut them all down?”

  “Whoever’s around then will figure that out. People are amazingly adaptable.”

  I pointed to a hickory with a trunk at least sixteen inches in diameter. “That tree’s roots hold and build the soil. Have you ever seen pictures of mud slides in Latin America, whole bunches of houses sliding down a mountain? We’re gonna have scenes like that in Georgia, if you developers don’t stop cutting down big trees and putting in little ones with shallow roots. Without trees, soil is like snow, sitting on top of whatever’s under it. Slides real easy. You really ought to leave the big trees. Think how classy they would make the place.”

  She narrowed her eyes and looked at the hickory. “There won’t be any hills in this subdivision. And those big roots get in the way of sewers and underground power lines.”

  “Couldn’t you put the clubhouse where the old house used to stand, with the pool where the azaleas were? It would look real pretty from the road, all surrounded with tall trees.”

  “It makes more sense to clear-cut and replant when we are done.” Her tone chilled me. She had no appreciation whatsoever for the fact that that tree had been on earth longer than I had. All she saw was an obstacle to her plans. It took all my willpower not to jump out, dash across the muddy field, and fling myself between the tree and the dozer.

  “I take it you’re naming this place Oak Hills in memory of the trees you’re killing?” If I sounded snide, I didn’t care.

  Her eyes grew stormy, but she didn’t pucker her forehead like I expected. Then I remembered that at the beauty parlor, somebody had mentioned that MayBelle had gone to Atlanta for minor surgery while I was out of town. Must have been plastic surgery. Maybe that’s why her eyes looked bigger, her crow’s-feet were gone, and her face wore that flat, blank look.

  She pulled to a stop again and got out. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She slammed the door real hard that time, and I could tell she was mad by the way she strode over to talk to another clump of workers. They could, too, from the way they edged closer to one another.

  I figured I might as well swing down and take a last look at those trees. I couldn’t ever recall having hugged a tree, but that afternoon I felt like hugging several. When I thought of the oxygen and coolness those trees would not contribute to the air, the birds and squirrels those limbs would never shelter, the soil those roots would not hold and those leaves would not enrich, I could have sat down and howled. All those years of growing, only to be pushed over in their prime for nothing but greed and one woman’s convenience.

  The bulldozer roared like a huge, hungry monster with an insatiable maw.

  I walked toward an oak and stroked its rough bark. It trembled beneath my hand. Were the ancients right about trees having dryads inside them? Did this tree sense its end was near?

  Then I realized that the trembling I felt was the earth around me. I looked up and saw, on the other side of the tree, the bulldozer bearing down on me. It had selected my oak as its next victim, and the driver couldn’t see me behind the thick trunk.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been approached by a bulldozer, but I can tell you that my thought processes went into hibernation. I stood there watching that thing come my way, and my feet wouldn’t jump to either side. Somebody yelled. That energized me, but instead of going sideways, my legs backed up. Next thing I knew, I had tumbled down a bank and was sitting on sharp rocks in twelve inches of muddy creek water with the most expensive skirt I owned hiked up around me. Red-orange water flowed across my legs and shoes and made the thick bandage on my left hand look like a repellent ketchup-soaked hot-dog bun. My expensive leather clutch purse floated out of reach while I waited for the tree to crash down on my head.

  17

  The air grew still. MayBelle yelled something to the driver and pelted toward me. Hands on hips, she glared from the high bank of the creek. “I thought you were in the Land Rover.” I couldn’t see her face for the sun in my eyes, but although it lit up her hair like a halo, she was no saint. I could tell by the way she stood that she’d like to throttle me.

  I moved my arms and legs to be sure they were still intact. “
I got out to say good-bye to the trees.” How could I have been so stupid?

  MayBelle obviously wondered the same thing.

  She turned and spoke curtly over her shoulder to some of the workmen. “Help her out.” Two men with thick, straight black hair, swarthy skin, and dark brown eyes slid down the muddy bank and put out caramel brown hands. “You’re not hurt, are you, Judge?” MayBelle finally thought to ask.

  “Judge?” they repeated. Their eyes flickered in fear, then both whirled and scrambled back up the bank. I heard the thud of their feet pounding across the field.

  I turned over on all fours and clambered to my feet, holding on to a couple of saplings for support. Good thing I hadn’t fallen in a few days later. MayBelle would have probably flattened the saplings by then, as well. As it was, she didn’t so much as lift a finger to help me.

  I limped, wet and muddy, toward a place where the bank wasn’t so steep, and accepted the bulldozer man’s grubby hand to pull me up. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I never seed you a-tall.”

  I exhaled a sigh of relief and frustration. “It’s okay.”