“Why should she think that?”
“Because I was trying so hard to get to know Willena. Wilma would never believe it was so I could look at those albums.”
“I can see how she might consider that a weak excuse to cotton up to someone,” I mused. I looked at Rachel through half-closed eyes and saw a strong young woman who certainly had the strength for the murder. She had gone outside with Grover but not returned with him. Had she stopped off at the ladies’ room to kill Willena on her way in? “You would have needed a motive,” I pointed out.
She laughed. “I’ve got a motive. What I’m missing is an alibi. Listen, how long before your husband will come looking for you?”
I sighed. “I didn’t leave a note,” I admitted.
“But you said—”
“I said Joe Riddley insists that I leave him a note saying where I’m going. I didn’t exactly say I had. This was only supposed to take a few minutes. I thought I’d be back before he was.”
She looked at me in dismay. “It is possible,” she pointed out, “that we could die up here.”
27
That spurred us to action.
“Maybe one of those chairs could break the door lock,” I suggested. Anything to salvage self-respect after monumental stupidity.
Rachel seized the extra chair and crashed it against the double doors again and again until the lovely wood was scarred and one of the legs broke off. The lock held. By now she was dripping with sweat and I read desperation in her eyes. Or were they mirroring my own?
She eyed the red drapes that hung from each window. “Maybe we could make a rope and climb down to the porch roof.”
I steadied a chair, and she climbed up on it to drag down a couple of lengths of heavy fabric. When we tried to tie them together, the knots were thick and unwieldy. “We could never trust those knots with our weight,” I concluded, “but if we could cut the drape into strips and braid them . . .”
Rachel loped to the bar and began pawing through drawers. “Voilà!” She held up a short paring knife. She brought it back and plunged it into the fabric, then ripped the drape from top to bottom. She stabbed a second spot and soon had torn a long strip. I yanked it between my hands to see if it was rotten. It held.
“Are you good with knots?” I asked.
“Only in shoelaces,” she said ruefully.
“Then you cut. I’ll braid and knot them.” I hoped I could remember distant Scout lessons on knots. I made several long, braided strips, then braided three of them together, knotted at intervals. Proudly I held up my crimson rope. “That ought to hold our weight.”
“Not ours,” Rachel corrected me. “Mine. If I can get down to the porch roof, I can break a window and get into the second floor. Then I’ll come up and let you out.”
“Do you know anything about rappelling?”
“Not a thing, but I’m willing to learn. I don’t want to spend a night in this place. Besides, I’m getting hungry.”
My own stomach gave a growl of agreement. We had only joked about hunger before. Now I felt like I had a ravening wolf inside.
We checked all the windows and chose one in the center. “More margin for error on each side,” Rachel joked. Now that we had a plan, we were getting giddy with relief.
She took what was left of the drape and tore off a short strip to tie her hair at the nape of her neck, then gestured at the window. “Okay, Mac, smash it. Your turn to be demolition crew.”
I enjoyed breaking that window so much that Rachel warned, “Don’t get addicted. We don’t want you smashing up Oglethorpe Street once we get out of here.”
The thought of actually strolling down Oglethorpe energized us both.
Rachel was all for crawling immediately through the hole I had made, but I insisted on removing shards and splinters of glass from the frame. “I don’t want you bleeding to death before you rescue me. You can bleed all you want to afterwards.”
We started laughing, and laughed until we had to hold our sides. That was how glad we were to be getting out.
Until we realized we still had a problem. She looked at the windowsill in bafflement. “What can we tie the rope to on this end?”
We looked around the bare room in dismay.
“A piano leg!” I crowed, and headed in its direction. “Help me roll it over here.”
By the time we had rolled the grand piano across that huge room, we were panting and gasping again. “Will you be able to do this?” I asked, anxious now that the moment had come.
“Just watch me. At worst, I’ll fall to the roof and break a leg. But you tie the knot to the piano leg. I’m not good with knots.”
“Thank God for Girl Scouts,” I said fervently. I made the rope as fast as I knew how and handed it to her. “It’s all yours. Good luck, hon.”
Without another word we exchanged a fierce hug. As she climbed onto the windowsill and looked down, I saw a shiver pass through her body. Admiration welled up in me. I doubted that I’d be able to lower myself out that window into space. Could she?
She threw the rope over the ledge, then knelt and took it in her hands. “Here I go, Mac. Wish me luck.”
“Mind if I pray instead? I usually find it more effective.”
She didn’t answer, just grabbed the rope tightly and lowered herself over the sill.
I prayed her all the way down. She more slid than rappeled, and from a yelp as she was halfway there, I suspected she had burned her palms, but one of the sweetest sounds I ever heard was the thud of her feet on the porch roof.
That sound was followed by silence.
“What’s the matter?” I called down.
“I don’t have any way to break the window. I’m going to take off my shirt and cover my hand—”
“No, wait a minute.” I trotted over to where the chair leg had broken off and snatched it up, then dashed back and called, “Stand clear. Bombs away.”
The leg clattered onto the roof. In another second I watched her swing the chair leg through the window, clear away the shards, and climb inside.
After that, nothing.
She left the ballroom at ten till six. By six thirty, I had run out of excuses—she stopped to go to the bathroom, she couldn’t find the key to the door—and run a complete gamut of fears. She had fallen inside and could not reach a phone. She had cut an artery getting in the window and quickly bled to death. She had decided to go for help and had a wreck on the highway. She had forgotten all about me.
I never imagined the disaster that had really happened.
In between worrying, I sat looking at treetops and reviewing events of the past week. I mentally repeated all the interviews I had had: Wilma in her shabby but historical living room and powdering her nose in my car. Hetty downstairs. Linette at the old Kenan home place. Dexter down at Mad Mooney’s. Clarence, with his unsuspected wealth. MayBelle in her Land Rover. Nancy, down at the detention center, wailing, “And all this time I thought it was Willena. I thought Grover was camouflage.”
I remembered Grover trembling in the coffee shop booth, and Sadie Lowe leaning across the table to console him.
I remembered what Gusta had said, and Meriwether. I thought of Rachel, white faced at being caught looking at albums at Willena’s and holding her emerald up to the morning sun.
I put the puzzle together in several ways. Eventually I knew who had killed Willena. I knew why, with what, and how. All I needed to do was tell Isaac James. He could do the rest.
“What I need around now,” I told the Boss upstairs, “is a miracle. Somebody coming down that drive or Wilma changing her mind and coming back.” But though I stared at the bit of the drive I could see until my eyes watered, I didn’t see a soul.
My stomach figured my throat had been cut. It growled and growled, protesting that it should be feasting on barbecue by now. I decided maybe I’d better try for my own escape.
The sun wasn’t going down yet, but it was heading that way, and this house faced east. Already the po
rch roof was dim and shady, blocked from the sun by the house itself. I picked up the rope and balanced it in my hand. Went to the windowsill and put one knee up. Tried to convince myself I could hang on and slide down it if Rachel could.
I couldn’t. My sore hand wouldn’t let me. But even if I had had two good hands, I knew I couldn’t face that instant of leaving the safety of the windowsill and swinging into space.
Standing there racked by indecision, I shivered. The breeze was cooler now that the sun was behind the trees. I picked up Rachel’s jacket from the table and draped it over my shoulders. Something thumped against my hip bone.
I debated with my conscience for half a second, then slid one hand in the pocket. It came out holding a miracle. My cell phone.
The question was, whom should I call? Charlie Muggins, to say I’d solved his case for him? The sheriff, since we were outside the city limits? Joe Riddley, so he could come kill me?
The thought of facing Joe Riddley or climbing down a ladder in front of law enforcement personnel was more than I felt up to. I could phone Ridd, but he was my law-abiding son, the one who would insist on calling the police or a rescue vehicle. What I wanted was somebody who wouldn’t mind breaking another window. I punched autodial.
Walker answered on the second ring. “Hey, Mama. What’s up?”
“I am. I’m up on the third floor of Willena Kenan’s house, locked in. Don’t ask how or why, but could you come over here and let me out? You’ll need to break a window to get in, but there’s nobody else around, and I’ve already broken several. Another one isn’t going to make much difference. Then come up the back stairs from the kitchen. There’s a key in that lock, I hope.”
I heard the kind of silence on the other end that meant Walker was trying not to swear. “You want to tell me what you’ve been up to?”
“Nothing at all. I was having a glass of tea out here with Hetty, Willena’s maid, when Wilma came by and took exception to my being in the house. She made me come up here—”
“Made you?”
I huffed. “Don’t ask so many questions. She made me come up here and locked me in. You know how petty she can be. But I think she left the key in the lock. If not, it looked like a skeleton key. The kind in all of Ridd’s doors. Borrow one of them on your way.”
“Can I tell Ridd what I’m borrowing it for? He’s likely to ask.”
I hesitated. “Okay, you can tell Ridd, but not your daddy. Understand? Not a word to your daddy.”
“Okay, but he’s already looking for you. He’s called here twice.”
“I’ll call and tell him I’ve been delayed but am on my way home. You get here as fast as you can. Oh, and son? Be real careful. Rachel Ford was up here with me until half an hour or so ago. She escaped by climbing down to the porch roof on a rope we made from the curtains”—I heard a noise that could have been a snort or a laugh, but I plowed on—“and she was supposed to go inside the house and come get me. But she hasn’t shown up, which worries me. Wilma has a gun and doesn’t know how to use it.”
Now he did swear. Where he learned those words I have never known. Certainly not in our house. “Mama, how did you get mixed up in this? A person with a gun who doesn’t know how to use it is the most dangerous kind of person in the world.”
“I know, but I think Wilma is probably back at her house right now eating dinner, reflecting that she has certainly shown me a thing or two. Just don’t come barreling down the drive without scouting things out first.”
Cindy spoke on the other extension. I wondered how long she’d been listening. “Does this have anything to do with Willena’s murder?”
“Not really. I think I’ve figured that out, but we got locked in because Wilma got mad that we came in the house without her permission.”
“And you don’t think she’s around now?”
“I haven’t heard her. Look, could Walker come get me out? Please?”
I didn’t mean for my voice to tremble, but I did sound pitiful. Walker’s voice was gruff when he replied, “Hang in there, Mama. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“I’ll love you forever if you’ll bring me a Hershey bar and a Coke. I’m starved.”
I spent a few minutes steeling myself, then dialed our house. To my great relief, Joe Riddley wasn’t there. I left him a voice mail. “I’m sorry I’m late, hon. I got delayed, but I’ll be home within the hour. Love you.”
That wouldn’t keep him from fussing, but at least he couldn’t claim I didn’t call.
I paced the floor and waited. Found a light switch and turned on the lights at the back end of the ballroom. Drank some more water. Used the bathroom. Started to wash the two glasses Rachel and I had used, then decided Rachel might want them as evidence. She was threatening to sue Wilma for all this. I tucked the glasses up behind some others, where they’d be obscure, and I stored the gin, tonic, and lime in a back corner beneath the bar.
By now it was too dusky outside for me to see anything on the driveway, but I strained my ears for the sound of Walker’s car.
I still couldn’t sit, so I began to pace again. Finally I heard the second-sweetest sound I’d heard all day. Somebody was turning the key to the ballroom’s back door.
I headed in that direction. “Boy, I’m glad you finally got here!” I called.
The door swung open.
MayBelle stood in the open doorway with another little silver gun pointed straight at me.
28
“I thought you were . . .” My voice and my courage deserted me at the same instant.
She laughed, lowered the gun, and dropped it into her big pocketbook as casually as if it were a wallet. Heavens to Betsy, did every woman in the investment club go around armed?
“I thought you were a squirrel. A very big squirrel.” We eyed each other warily. She seemed as discombobulated as I was. If she hadn’t stood between me and the door, I’d have made a dash for it. But I didn’t know if she was in league with Wilma or a possible deliverer.
She peered up at the high ceiling with its eight crystal chandeliers. “Isn’t this marvelous? Wilma said we couldn’t look at the top floor tonight because squirrels got in and made a big mess, but it looks . . .” Finally she spied the piano in front of the window with the rope still tied to one leg, the shattered chair near the double doors, three broken windows, and the pile of savaged drapery. She frowned. “That wasn’t squirrels. Has she had vandals?”
I finally found a faint voice. “No, that was me. I was locked in, so I broke the windows and made a rope. But then I couldn’t climb with my injured hand.” I decided to leave Rachel out of the story. Where was Rachel?
MayBelle looked at me like I had escaped from some asylum. “How on earth could you get locked in? The key was right in the door.”
I took a chance on the truth. “On the outside of the door. Wilma got annoyed with me for visiting Hetty.”
MayBelle’s eyes widened until her new face almost wrinkled. “Lordy, that woman has come plumb unhinged by grief.”
“You can say that again.” I edged closer to the door, desperate to leave. MayBelle started pacing off the width of the ballroom.
“How did you get here?” I peered down the staircase to be sure it was empty but was reluctant to go without her. Wilma could be at the bottom, ready to do to me whatever she’d done to Rachel. I found the thought of MayBelle’s gun immensely reassuring.
She spoke absently from across the room. “Wilma ran over to check on whether Hetty cleaned up their place before she left, so I decided to sneak up. I’d heard you moving around, and figured you were either the world’s biggest squirrel or a prowler.”
“But how did you get to the house? I didn’t hear your car on the drive.” I moved away from the door until she was ready to leave, not wanting to make a target of myself should Wilma appear on the landing.
“I used the shortcut from Wilma’s. I had told her I wanted first refusal on the house, and she called today to say I could see it this
evening while she checked to be sure Hetty and Baker had gotten all their stuff out. I stopped by her house to get her, but she’d already come ahead, so I used the back way.”
I had forgotten there was an old tractor track that the Kenans had paved to connect the two houses so they could get from one to the other without going up to the highway. When Willena got concerned about the environment, she had replaced her driveway with pea gravel, but had left the asphalt on the shortcut. It would have been a stealthier way to come.
MayBelle completed her measurements and turned briskly. “Come on. It’s too stuffy to stay up here long.”
Guess Who's Coming to Die? Page 24
