Guess Who's Coming to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Gusta was dressed, as usual, so that if she had to step in and chair an important meeting, she wouldn’t have to change. Today she had on a soft blue cotton dress that accented her silver hair, with a matching cotton jacket. Need I remind you that those women owed their wealth to cotton mills? And that both had maids who did all their ironing?

  I had scarcely taken a third rocker when Florine came out with a Limoges china cup and saucer for me. Gusta nodded to Meriwether, who poured steaming coffee from a silver coffeepot. Gusta had told me years ago, “I firmly believe that when a woman reaches sixty-five, she ought to throw away her second-best dishes and flatware and use her best china and silver every day.” Augusta Wainwright was one woman who lived by what she believed.

  As I sat stirring cream in my coffee with a sterling spoon and put the delicate cup to my lips, it occurred to me that Gusta might be right about a few things.

  Of course, she could be tiresome, too. She consulted a small gold watch that hung from a gold bow on her chest and said, “It’s nine thirty, MacLaren. What brings you to us when you ought to be working?”

  “Good coffee,” I replied.

  “It is good,” she agreed, indicating by a nod to Meriwether that she would like more.

  “But I also wanted to see if either of you remembered anything about Monday night that might shine some light on what happened.” These were such good friends that I dared to confide, “I hated it when Charlie was focusing on Cindy back when he thought it was murder . . .”

  The expressions on their faces made me realize they hadn’t heard the news, so I backtracked and filled them in on Willena’s heart attack. I continued, “So if Charlie was looking at Cindy as his prime suspect for the murder, because MayBelle told him she and Willena had a fight at the meeting, now he’s likely to think she used the corkscrew. I’m looking for anything that would prove she didn’t.”

  “She wouldn’t!” Meriwether exclaimed. “Cindy would never hurt anybody.”

  “She couldn’t have used the corkscrew,” Gusta declared. Her tone left open the question of whether Cindy would or would not hurt anybody, which made me want to smack her, but she pointed out, “Cindy left before Willena got her present. Remember? While we were holding the election of officers, Cindy got up and dashed out. She never came back to the room.”

  I had forgotten that elections were held right after Willena shamed Cindy about buying Walker’s company stock. Now I remembered that during the elections Cindy had seethed, her eyes full of unshed tears. Finally she had muttered to me, “I want to check on the kids,” and rushed from the room. She hadn’t seen Wilma give Willena the silver bar set.

  “I could kiss you, Gusta,” I declared.

  “Have more coffee instead,” she suggested, nodding for Meriwether to refill my cup.

  I felt so relieved that I held out my cup without hesitation, although it was my fourth of the morning. “I had also wanted to ask you a few questions about Rachel Ford,” I told Meriwether. “But now I think I’ll drink my coffee and go to work. I can ask about Rachel later.”

  Meriwether filled the cup and handed it back. “What did you want to know?”

  “Anything, actually. All I know is she used to be a hotshot international lawyer in New York and came down here eighteen months ago to take the job of director at the Poverty Law Center. I don’t know a thing about her family, where she grew up, where she went to school — all the stuff that gives you something to talk about with a stranger. Joe Riddley has suggested I get to know the women in the club,” I added, in case they wondered about my sudden interest.

  I could tell by the glint in Gusta’s eye that she didn’t believe a word of it, but Meriwether has always had the better manners of the two.

  “Well, let’s see.” She set her cup down on a little wicker table beside her and stretched her long legs out before her to soak up the sun. She was wearing pink flats to match her skirt and sweater.

  “You look good enough to eat,” I told her.

  Gusta sniffed. “If she isn’t careful, she’s going to get as bad as Wilma, with shoes to match each outfit.”

  Meriwether grimaced. “Call me anything but Wilma, Nana. I’ll even give up my pink shoes.”

  “Honey,” I told her, “you are beautiful and you know it. And you have a gorgeous baby and a husband who loves you dearly. Keep the shoes. You will never end up like Wilma. Wilma is fifty percent pride and fifty percent bitterness, all wrapped up in postponed living and tied with the bow of discontent.”

  “Mac is a poet!” Meriwether told her grandmother admiringly. “Shall we nominate her for poet laureate of Hopemore?”

  “Nominate me for a new job, if I don’t finish talking to you pretty quick and get down to the store.” I set my cup down on the table. “Quick, tell me what you know about Rachel.”

  “She grew up in New York City. Manhattan, I think. Her mother was Jewish and her daddy an Italian Catholic. Their name wasn’t Ford to start with. She and her brother changed it when they grew up. I don’t know why.”

  “She has a brother?” Rachel seemed more alone than any woman I knew.

  “She did. He was in the army and got killed in Iraq. It’s his car she drives. He wasn’t married, so he left her what she calls ‘his bits and pieces.’ His death pretty much shattered her. Their mother had died the year before, and their dad had been gone for several years, so when her brother died, Rachel was utterly alone. She says she decided to start over somewhere without so many memories.”

  “But why Hopemore?”

  “Why not?” Gusta demanded, bristling.

  “We aren’t exactly the center of the universe,” I reminded her. “Finding the place would take some doing from New York.”

  Meriwether sipped her coffee with a thoughtful expression. “I don’t think she ever said. I got the impression that she read an ad for the job, came down to interview, and liked it here.”

  I sat there thinking all that over. “Even after losing her brother and her mother, it’s hard for me to believe she would give up a successful job in international law to head a poverty law center down here.”

  Meriwether’s laugh was like a bell. “She didn’t have a successful career in international law. She was one of a zillion lawyers in a New York firm, and she hadn’t been there but three years, so she was way down on the totem pole.”

  “What was she doing before that?”

  “Taking care of her mother. She was an invalid. I don’t know what she had, but she got confined to a wheelchair while Rachel was in law school. Rachel’s brother took care of her until Rachel finished, and then Rachel took over. She cared for her mother for years and years. I don’t know what they lived on. But eventually her mother got so sick that she needed full-time care. Rachel took a job in a law firm so she and her brother together could afford enough to hire somebody to look after their mom.”

  “I’m presuming from all this that the family didn’t have much money, and that Rachel bought her house here with her mother’s and brother’s estates. So how did she get in the investment club?”

  “Meriwether nominated her,” Gusta spoke with asperity. “I told her it wasn’t suitable, but—”

  “But Rachel is smart, and she needs to learn how to invest money. Besides, she knew Grover in New York. He and her brother went to Haverford together, and he used to come home with her brother for holidays or something.”

  “Then her brother must have been a lot older than she.”

  “I guess so.” Meriwether obviously hadn’t given that any thought.

  I remembered something. “Wilma told me Thursday that Grover asked Willena to help make Rachel feel at home here. Maybe he was the one who told her about the job at the law center.”

  I could not imagine our Poverty Law Center board advertising in New York City, but they might have run an ad in the Augusta paper. Wilma had also said that Grover told Willena that Rachel had been a prominent attorney in New York. Was he doing a favor for his old buddy’s li
ttle sister? Or was there something between them that nobody knew about? I remembered that the two of them had gone out into the parking lot together in the streaming rain. That merited more thought at a later time.

  Right now, Meriwether was setting her cup on its saucer with a delicate click, and then she stood. “It’s been great, Nana, but I’d better get back before Zach kills Jed or vice versa.”

  “I keep telling you that man knows nothing about raising children,” Gusta snapped. “Growing up with those two awful Blaines, he’ll probably be pouring whiskey down that infant’s throat any day now. Next time, you bring the baby with you, you hear me?”

  “Shall I give you a lift?” I offered.

  When Meriwether had moved into her own home and out of her grandmother’s, Gusta had carried on like she was moving to Iowa. She actually lived three long blocks away.

  Meriwether hesitated. “I could walk, it’s so gorgeous, but I am tired. Zach is teething and was up most of the night.” She plucked her sweater away from her chest. “And if I don’t get home soon to feed him, I’m going to be one sopping mess.”

  As Gusta let out a scandalized “Do!” Meriwether gave me a wink.

  23

  The young DuBoses lived on Liberty Street, a five-block stretch of comfortable one-story houses built between 1890 and 1920. The area had gone through a dismal period beginning in the 1950s, when the fashion was for small brick ranch houses farther out of town, but had been rediscovered in the eighties and nineties by young couples with an eye for charm and more energy than money. They had restored the old houses, and painted them in pleasant shades of blue, green, yellow, white, and cream, with contrasting shutters. Children now played on the sidewalks and in small front lawns, cats sunned on porches, and patches of flowers brightened almost every yard.

  As I pulled to a stop in front of Meriwether’s house, she pointed to one diagonally across the street. “Rachel’s front door is standing open. Do you want to see her house?”

  “Won’t she mind?” I hated the idea of going up to an almost-stranger’s house to invite myself in.

  Meriwether laughed. “On this street? It’s downright neighborly to go see what progress has been made on a house. I understand that several years ago, a favorite pastime if you got depressed was visiting your neighbors to see how much worse their places looked than your own. I really need to feed Zach, or I’d take you over. Knock and call through the door. She’ll be glad to show you around. Don’t expect miracles, though. She’s doing most of the work herself. But she started inside, so she’s accomplished more than shows from here.”

  I certainly hoped so. The place had been owned most of my lifetime by a grim old widow who had let the place deteriorate as her eyesight and resources failed. Yet whenever a young couple had approached about buying, she had declared, “I don’t aim to sell this house till I die.”

  “And how,” Joe Riddley had asked me in private, “does she plan to sell it then?”

  She had finally died a year or so before, and her grandson in Atlanta had been delighted to sell it to Rachel. Why Rachel wanted it, I could not imagine. What I could see from the street wasn’t enticing, except for one corner made up of curved windows. We’d had a corner like that in our big blue house. Otherwise, it had a plain front with double windows on either side of a narrow door, a pointed tin roof, peeling white clapboard siding, and a small front porch with banisters like a chorus line of fat women’s legs. Whoever had built it lacked originality and flair.

  As I crossed the street, I noticed that the chorus line was missing several legs, and the sidewalk was cracked and had lifted in several places. Rachel hadn’t done a thing about the peeling white paint or the yard, which was little more than a small plot of patchy grass and scraggly bushes. I wondered if she would be offended if I offered to send my son Ridd over for a consultation. Ridd is legendary for his ability to transform barren yards into showplaces, and if he weren’t already happy as a high school math teacher and part-time farmer, he could make a good living helping other folks landscape their yards.

  This did not look to me like the house of a prosperous attorney, but in front sat a shiny black Lexus that looked suspiciously like Slade’s. Had he come this early on a Saturday to try to wring blood from this particular turnip?

  I stood at the front door and knocked. “Hello?”

  “Come in,” Rachel called from somewhere inside. “We can’t come to the door right this minute.”

  I walked hesitantly into the front hall. The hall was dim and chilly out of the sun, and smelled of sawed wood, Sheetrock mud, and some kind of chemical that made me suspect she had opened the door to let fumes out. The floor was rough and littered with scraps of wood and drifts of sawdust. One doorjamb was fresh and unpainted, while white patches on the dingy blue walls indicated the plaster had needed numerous repairs.

  “We’re in here.” Rachel sounded out of breath. I found her standing on a couple of boards laid across two sawhorses in the middle of the living room, screwing a large brass light fixture to the ceiling. It gleamed in the dim room. Brass polish was what I had smelled.

  Slade stood on the boards beside her, holding it up while she screwed it in place. Her breathlessness, I deduced, came not from standing so near him but from the exertion of standing so long with her arms overhead. “Okay,” she announced with satisfaction. “That ought to hold.” She turned and looked down at me in surprise but no special delight. “Hello, Judge.”

  “Hey, there. I was dropping Meriwether off, and she suggested I come look at your house.”

  “Sure.” She squatted and jumped down, then bounded to her feet with an agility that made me envious. Her face, however, was not as energetic as the rest of her. She still looked pale, and even sadder than she had the day before. I wondered if her run-in with Wilma the previous afternoon had anything to do with that.

  For construction work she had pulled her hair carelessly back and secured it with a rubber band. Tendrils of curls were escaping, but they looked messy rather than charming. She wore paint-stained jeans and a T-shirt, and hadn’t bothered to put on a speck of makeup, even lipstick.

  Slade, of course, was immaculate in tan coveralls that set off his swarthy good looks. I suspected that underneath he had on pressed khaki slacks and a pretty polo shirt in yellow, green, or tan. He descended more cautiously from the boards across the sawhorses and brushed his hands together. “The place has a long way to go before it’s finished,” he warned. “Rachel’s doing most of the work herself.”

  I tried to count up how many days it had been since they were going at it hammer and tongs in my parking lot. Certainly no more than four. And as recently as yesterday afternoon he had been maligning her name. Yet today he followed her into the kitchen like he half owned the place. I will never understand men if I live to be a hundred and raise a dozen of them.

  However, I couldn’t help remembering that he had followed Meriwether around her house the same way back before she and Jed got engaged, and how Slade had even taken it on himself to supervise Meriwether’s workers while she was out of town.

  “I haven’t started the kitchen yet,” Rachel apologized, standing in the middle of a dingy assortment of elderly appliances and cabinets. “I began with my bedroom and bath, so I’d have a haven to escape to, and then did my office, because I can’t stand to work in chaos. But now I keep tracking stuff in on the carpet.” She led the way to a pretty yet austere bedroom done in sage green and cream with a creamy Berber rug on the floor. The carpet looked a lot like the one Slade had in his office, except this one had trails of sawdust crisscrossing it.

  The bathroom next door (for this house was too old to have a bath adjoining the master bedroom) sported a new tile floor and freshly painted woodwork, but the walls were bare. “I plan to paper in here,” she explained.

  Slade stepped back to let Rachel lead the way into a small bedroom converted into an office painted taupe and cream. She looked so weary and sad, I wondered if she was ge
tting dispirited at having taken on so much alone.

  “It’s always a toss-up whether to do one room at a time or all the rooms at once,” I comforted her. “We had the same problem when we redid our house several years ago.”

  Rachel sighed. “It’s a mess, whichever you choose. But I’ve painted the ceilings in the living room, dining room, and hall now, and with Slade’s help this morning I’ve gotten all the light fixtures in, so I can paint the walls and sand the floors. Or sand and paint. I don’t know which to do first. I don’t want to get sawdust on painted walls or paint on the newly finished floor.”

  “Paint first,” I advised from experience. “The sanding machines vacuum up most of the dust.”

  I followed her around, excessively admiring the work she had done and plans she had for what she still had to do, trying to strike at least one spark of enthusiasm in her face, but she continued to look like somebody who had swum halfway across a lake and realized it was going to be a long way to shore no matter which way she turned.