Guess Who's Coming to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I was too stunned to reply.

  She looked at her watch. “Before I call Jed, shall I ask Hetty to bring you some coffee?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “I had coffee in Augusta.” I would be too embarrassed to look Hetty in the eye at the moment.

  “Then I’ll call Jed and tell him to come on over.”

  As she trotted toward the living room, I reflected that it must be nice to take it for granted that a lawyer would come as soon as you called.

  Willena’s house might not be as old as Wilma’s, but it was a lot more welcoming. Willena had a knack for combining antiquity with comfort. Her walls were a soft yellow instead of Wilma’s chalk white. Her wide front hall was bright with paintings of flowers and landscapes rather than gloomy ancestors, and the golden oak floor was covered with one large and two smaller matching Oriental rugs that glowed in soft shades of red, green, and cream. A creamy brocade sofa along the left-hand wall suggested that if walking in from your car had tired you, you could pause and catch your breath. I particularly admired the staircase, which went up along the right side of the hall and made a graceful U-turn at the landing before climbing to the second floor.

  That was as far as I had gotten with my admiring—which took all of five seconds — when Wilma demanded, “What are you doing here?”

  I hurried to the living room arch. Rachel Ford sat on one end of the sofa clutching a photo album to her chest. Additional albums were piled beside her. She looked wan and tired, and the circles under her eyes were darker than they had been Monday night. But her chin was up in defiance at Wilma’s tone. “Hetty let me in. Willena said last week that I could come look at some of her old pictures for an article I am writing on clothes of the 1930s.” She gestured to the albums. “I was going through these to see what the people were wearing.”

  Were those tears on her cheeks? She wiped them away as if they were dust.

  Wilma primmed her lips. “Hetty should never have let you in without my permission. At the least, she should have stayed with you.”

  Red stained Rachel’s cheeks, and her blue-gray eyes glittered. “I’m not stealing anything, if that’s what you’re implying. I don’t want the pictures, I just wanted to look at them.”

  “Nevertheless . . .” Wilma dragged the word out and gave Rachel a long, cold look.

  I took the chance to peer around the living room, which was filled with an eclectic mix of old and new. The chairs and sofas looked comfortable, with thick, soft cushions. Some had footstools for those who liked them. Instead of Wilma’s fixed, formal setting, Willena’s furniture looked like it had been shifted around until she found the most pleasing arrangement. Antique china plates and marble busts on pedestals were interspersed with souvenirs from trips around the globe, so that a new handwoven basket held magazines beside an eighteenth-century wing chair and looked right at home there.

  Rachel, however, appeared decidedly ill at ease as she closed the album she’d been examining and put it on top of the stack. She rose. “May I ask you not to throw these out until I’ve had a chance to look through them?”

  “Those are family photographs. I have no intention of throwing them out.” Wilma stepped slightly back and waited. The instructions were clear. Rachel obediently headed for the hall, but at the doorway she turned.

  “May I have permission to look through them at a later date?”

  Wilma’s voice promised nothing. “We can discuss it after I’ve gotten through all this.” She made a little gesture to encompass not only Willena’s house, but her death.

  Through a long front window I watched Rachel descend the front porch steps and head around the side of the house for her car. Had Wilma noticed that she carried neither pen nor notebook? Odd, for somebody researching an article.

  20

  “Can you imagine the nerve?” Wilma demanded. “After I’ve called Jed, I’ll have a word with Hetty. We can’t have every Tom, Dick, and Harry barging in here.”

  I turned. “You’ll be busy, then. I really need to get on back to the store.” I didn’t think I could stand to spend another ten minutes in her company at that point.

  Back at the office I managed to get through a good bit of work before the phone rang.

  “MacLaren? MayBelle Brandison here. I wanted to see if you’re all right after that wetting you got yesterday.”

  I allowed as how I was fine.

  “No cold or anything?”

  I couldn’t tell if she hoped I had one or that I didn’t. “Nary a sneeze,” I assured her. “I spent the morning driving Wilma to Augusta so she could give a talk, and got back only a little while ago.”

  “I need to drive in sometime this week and talk to Grover about my account. I don’t know if you’ve got a good broker, but he’s wonderful.”

  “He must be. Wilma uses him, and this morning Sadie Lowe told me she uses him, too.”

  “Where did you see Sadie Lowe?”

  The devil gave me a little nudge. “Oh, she and Grover were having a cozy little chat in a coffee shop when I dropped in for some cappuccino and a biscotti.”

  “I see.”

  I had no idea what MayBelle could see from that.

  “Have you heard that Nancy is in jail?” she asked.

  “I told you that yesterday,” I reminded her. “I went to see her before I came to see you.”

  “Oh, that’s right. How is Wilma holding up?”

  “Sad, but managing. You know Wilma.”

  MayBelle’s laugh wasn’t the least bit humorous. “Oh, yes. Competent to the bone.”

  Before we hung up I had to assure her again that I had no interest whatsoever in buying a small plot of ground to build a big house on in Oak Hills Plantation. I hung up wondering what on earth that call had been about.

  When the phone rang again almost immediately, I thought maybe she was calling back to tell me whatever she had forgotten to tell me before. Instead, it was Chief Muggins.

  “Hey, Judge. I’m trying to get in touch with Mrs. Yarbrough.”

  “You’ve got her.” I aimed for a light tone and willed my voice not to shake.

  Impatience poured through the line. “The other one. Mrs. Walker Yarbrough. I keep calling, but nobody answers. I stopped by, too, but there’s nobody there.”

  “Which is probably why nobody answers the phone.” My voice didn’t wobble, but I was glad he couldn’t see me. My hands had started shaking so badly, I could hardly hold the phone, and my stomach was doing flip-flops.

  “When did you see her last?” He sounded like he suspected me of hiding Cindy in our office safe.

  I paused as if I needed time to think. “Monday night, I guess. I’ve been real busy catching up from my trip. You know how things pile up when you’re gone.”

  He gave a grunt I suppose he meant for a laugh. “Is that why you were drinking at Mad Mooney’s yesterday? Whatever you were pouring down your throat must have been mighty strong to make you take a dip out at Mrs. Brandison’s new subdivision before she dug the pool.”

  I forgot my manners enough to snap, “Seems like you’d have better things to do than listen to gossip. I nearly got run over by a bulldozer. Did your sources include that tidbit?”

  “No, they neglected to mention it.”

  “Well, tell your deputies they’d do better to hop on over to Pleasantville and clean up the trash. You can fill the city coffers for the next month with fines.”

  You can push a vicious animal only so far. “When I need you to tell me how to do my job, I’ll ask. Meanwhile, if you see your daughter-in-law, tell her to keep herself visible. And she’d better not leave town. You hear me?”

  “I hear you. But every other member of the club except Rachel has left town since the murder, and I haven’t heard you squawking about that.”

  “They didn’t say they hadn’t been in the bathroom when they had.”

  “She didn’t—” Just before I said something I might regret, I remembered what Joe Riddley had said: “Do al
l in your power to keep the peace.”

  I clutched my manners in both fists and muttered between my teeth, “Sorry. I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job. But before you get too set on Cindy, have you talked to Nancy Jensen?”

  “Yeah. She’s down at the detention center for firing at her husband.”

  “She didn’t—” I bit my tongue. Do all you can to maintain the peace, I reminded myself silently, so I took a deep breath and said in as casual a tone as I could muster, “She might be connected to Willena’s murder. Remember? She left our meeting early, upset about something.”

  He gave me an impatient huff. “She didn’t leave her keys under the body, or claim she was out in the rain talking on a cell phone when nobody saw her.”

  “Grover saw Cindy.” I was so delighted to hand him that piece of news, I felt like dancing a jig. “When I was up in Augusta this morning with Wilma, I ran into Grover Henderson, our stockbroker. He said he saw Cindy standing in the rain while he was at his car getting something for Rachel, and Cindy was still out there on the phone when he left just before the end of the break.”

  “Judge, butt out of this case. I don’t need you traipsing all over Georgia interviewing my witnesses. I do need to tell you that your daughter-in-law is going to be in a passel of trouble if she doesn’t give me a call in the next twenty-four hours to let me know she is in Hope County.”

  Click.

  21

  That call scared me to death. I couldn’t sit there and work like nothing was wrong. Chief Muggins is nobody to mess with when he’s mad. Walker would be in trouble, too, for taking his wife out of town. When I pictured my son’s picture hanging in the post office with a number under his face, I sent up a frantic prayer. “Help! Show me what to do!”

  Nothing happened.

  My eye fell on my calendar, and I saw that my next monthly garden column for the Hopemore Statesman was due Monday. Maybe writing it would take my mind off Charlie.

  If you are a subscriber, you may remember that particular column. I told readers to put a pound of ammonium sulfate around each blueberry plant instead of an ounce, and forgot to warn them to leave it six inches away from the trunk to prevent burning. Thank goodness it rained a lot the week the column came out and I could print a correction the next week. Otherwise, we could have lost a lot of good blueberry bushes in Middle Georgia that summer.

  When I was finished, I couldn’t bear to sit in my office any longer, so I decided to run the column down to the newspaper office even though it wasn’t due for three days. I hoped I could walk off some anger, fright, and tension on the way, but although the day had turned out lovely after the rain, with a cloudless sky and blossoms practically bursting into bloom as I passed, I kept thinking about Walker and Cindy and wondering how I could get in touch with them.

  Nothing had occurred to me by the time I reached the paper office. I planned to leave the column at the front desk and go on back to work, but Slade heard my voice. “Mac,” he called, “come on back. I want to ask you a question.”

  I trotted around to his office. He greeted me at the door, but as soon as I was seated he resumed what he called his “thinking position,” lying back in his chair with his shiny loafers propped on his desk. The office had improved since Slade took over. The old green walls were now a soft cream, the battered metal desk and filing cabinet that had been there all my life had been replaced by a walnut desk and an attractive computer table, and wall-to-wall white Berber carpet covered the scarred gray linoleum. A dark green blind hid the view of the paper’s parking lot, and several nice prints hung on the wall. Slade had good taste in everything except picking women.

  I wriggled to get more comfortable in the green chair across from him and wished somebody in town would buy chairs for short people. “Ask away. But if it’s about Willena’s murder and you quote me in next week’s paper after what you did to me this week, I’ll hang you up by the fingernails and let the pigs eat your toes.”

  “Ouch.” I saw his loafers bulge as he curled his toes under. He studied his toes a minute, then blurted a question that, by his expression, wasn’t what he had intended to ask. “What do you know about Rachel Ford? I can’t figure her out. I mean, she shows up here after working in a New York law firm, where you know she had to have made more than she gets here, she takes a dead-end job in this—” He stopped, rubbing one temple with his forefinger like that would stimulate his brain to get him out of the hole he’d just dug.

  “Dead-end town?” I supplied.

  He had the grace to flush. “Well, you have to admit it’s not New York. She drives a car almost as old as she is, doesn’t seem to care a thing about clothes or how her hair looks—”

  “I think her hair is attractive. I used to wish I had naturally curly black hair.”

  “You would. But I mean she doesn’t go to the beauty parlor, or get manicures—”

  “She has lovely hands, even without polish.”

  “That’s beside the point. She doesn’t seem to care about fixing herself up, doesn’t seem to have many friends, so far as I know she never dates—”

  “She’s fixing up a house. That can pretty fully occupy your free time if you let it. But I know little about her. Maybe you ought to ask her some of these questions. Get to know her better.” Seeing his expression, I added, “I know—she’s neither rich nor classically beautiful—”

  “She’s almost plain except for those eyes,” he said bluntly. “Besides, she’s from New York. Give me a soft Southern girl anytime.”

  “Okay, I know she’s not your type. But there can be other relationships between a man and a woman than romance. She might become a friend. She is, after all, an intelligent woman with a number of interests. You’ve mentioned a time or two how few of them we seem to have around here.”

  He put his fingers together in a way that made me wonder if he, too, had played “Here is the church, here is the steeple” when he was a kid. “My mama used to tell me, ‘Don’t put it on your plate if you have no intention of eating it. That’s a waste of good food.’ ”

  “Well, my mama used to say, ‘You’ll never know if you like it until you try it.’ Is that why you called me in here, to ask about Rachel?”

  “Heavens, no. I wanted to ask if you’ve heard that Charlie got the initial autopsy report on Willena Kenan.”

  “Already?” Given the backload of cases, I was surprised they’d gotten to it so quickly. On the other hand, it wasn’t every day that a Kenan heir got murdered in our part of Georgia.

  Slade knew I was dying to hear what they’d found, so he looked up at the ceiling and whistled a few notes like he had nothing on his mind.

  I sat there and waited, refusing to ask.

  Finally he grinned at me. “The corkscrew didn’t kill her, her heart just stopped.”

  I stared. “I never heard she had heart problems. Did they check for poison?”

  “I don’t know, but ‘natural causes’ is what the medical examiner is calling it. Chief Muggins will be announcing it on the six-o’clock news.”

  “He didn’t say a thing about this when he called me not an hour ago.”

  Slade looked smug. “Ah, but the report just came in. I went by his office to see if there was anything new on the case, and he was hanging up from talking to you as I got there. The autopsy report came in while I was there, and he was on the phone with the television networks when I left.”

  “Telling them he’s solved the case, probably. How does he plan to explain a corkscrew through her throat — or has he overlooked that little detail?”

  “I asked about that. He said he doesn’t plan to mention it. He figures that somebody found Willena dying and took perverse pleasure”—he caught my expression and held up both hands—“I swear, Mac, that’s what he said—somebody took perverse pleasure in settling a score.” Slade paused and touched his throat. “Macabre, isn’t it? Do you have any opinion about who might have done it?”

  He was watching me closely,
so I picked up a pencil and played with it as if I were thinking. MayBelle Brandison was my first choice. Even if she hadn’t killed Willena, she was irritated about the lawsuit and she had a coarse sense of humor. She might have felt the corkscrew delivered an appropriate message. But I knew Chief Muggins preferred Cindy. She and Willena had had a fight, and Cindy was strong. She worked out and played tennis several times a week.

  I shook my head. “I’ve known some perverse people in my life, but nobody perverse enough to do that sort of thing. Where did the chief come up with that word?”