Too Late for Angels

by Mignon F. Ballard

  Clouds streaked across the sun and the wind had picked up as Lucy came out of the post office and crossed the parking lot to her car.

  “Blanche, Stella! You come back here! Lucy Nan, stop them! Don’t let those naughty imps get past you!”

  Lucy stopped in mid-stride to see two miniature white poodles tearing across the parking lot, leashes whipping along behind them, with Poag Hemphill, breathless and red-faced, in pursuit. Quickly she dropped her handbag and sprinted to scoop up the closest escapee, cuddling it as she stroked its woolly head, while Poag coaxed the other from underneath a minivan.

  “Shame on you, Blanche! You, too, Stella!” Poag took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and cleaned his glasses. “Thanks, Lucy Nan. I stopped for just a second back there to pick up some litter off the sidewalk and I guess I must’ve lost my grip on the leashes. If it hadn’t been for you, they would’ve run right into the traffic!” He held out a small plastic bag half-filled with empty cigarette packages and soft-drink cans. “I know I shouldn’t let it bother me so, but I can’t understand people throwing trash right here on the street. It’s unsightly and disgusting!”

  Lucy agreed with him and set the little dog—Stella, she presumed—down beside its companion, keeping a firm grip on the leash. “I’ve been wanting to call you,” she said, reaching out to touch his shoulder. “I was so sorry to hear about Calpernia, Poag. I know what it’s like to lose someone you love, and I’ve had you on my mind since it happened.”

  He smiled, collecting both leashes. “I know. It’s hard to know what to say, isn’t it? It’s been a week now since Cal’s been gone and—well, frankly, I don’t know how to act.”

  The dogs began to chase each other, winding their leashes around his legs, and he slowly extracted himself. “Walk with me a little way?” he asked, his voice muffled.

  “Of course.” Lucy smiled. “Not that I need the exercise!” She took his arm. “Poag, this has been a terrible shock to all of us—and to have it happen while you were away! I can only imagine what you’ve been through.”

  He cleared his throat. “It was a long trip home, Lucy Nan. A long trip home. Thank God we had a chance to spend at least a few minutes together before I left for that tour with the chorus—too damn few!”

  Wind blew brown leaves across the walk as they turned the corner into Palmetto Street, and they walked silently for a minute. “People have been so kind,” Poag said, as they waited to cross the street. “The other day the editor of The Signal—that’s the campus newspaper, you know—brought me a photograph made of Cal and me saying our good-byes just before I boarded the bus the night I left. They were planning to run it in the next issue until…well…that happened.

  “If only she’d come with me—but Cal didn’t like to fly.” He shook his head. “Well, I guess she’s flying with the angels now.”

  Lucy rather doubted that but she hoped she looked suitably soulful.

  “I still don’t know what in hell Calpernia was doing up there,” he said, taking her arm as they crossed the street. “I suppose you’ve heard they suspect foul play—seem to have zeroed in on that young director, but I honestly can’t see him doing anything like that. He may have jazzed up his résumé—probably did—but we’ve had the fellow over to the house for dinner a couple of times, and, Lucy Nan, he just doesn’t seem the type.”

  “So, do you think Calpernia might have fallen?”

  “I’d like to think that, considering the alternative. Cal wasn’t fond of heights, but she was really committed to the idea of developing a permanent theater workshop out there—and you know how impulsive she was. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t suddenly decide to climb to the top of that idiotic Folly just to get the lay of the land.”

  Poag paused to let the dogs sniff at the base of a dogwood tree. “Oh, I know Cal wasn’t always popular with some of the people here,” he said, “but not to that extent.” His hand trembled as he untangled one of the poodles from the leash. “No, damn it! Not to that extent!”

  He looked so utterly miserable that Lucy wanted to fold him into her arms right there in front of the Baptist Church and soothe away the hurt as she did for Teddy, and for her children before him, but she knew in her heart the kind of hurt Poag Hemphill was experiencing couldn’t be easily soothed. “When was the last time you sat down and had a decent meal?” she asked, taking his hand.

  He avoided her gaze. “Oh, neighbors have brought enough food to feed an army, and several friends invited me over, but to tell the truth, I don’t have much of an appetite.” He shrugged. “I’ve just been eating whenever I feel the need.”

  “I’ve plenty of soup left from yesterday and it won’t take a minute to stir up some corn bread. You need some nourishing food inside you, Poag. Come back to the house with me for lunch.” But first leave Stella and Blanche at home! Lucy had seen what one of them had rolled in and she didn’t care to have it smeared on her freshly cleaned carpet.

  “Oh, Lucy Nan, you are a dear! My poor deprived stomach rumbles at the thought, but I really must get these two back home. I have to meet with Albert Evans this afternoon to make plans for Calpernia’s service. They’re finally letting her go.”

  It would be a busy week for Evans & Sons Funeral Home, who had just put poor Shirley/Florence away. “Do you know yet when it will be?” she asked.

  “Saturday afternoon at three. We’ll have the visitation afterward. There should be a notice in tomorrow’s paper.”

  One of the dogs scrambled to chase after a squirrel and Poag picked up the poodle and tucked it under his arm. “I just want to get it over with,” he said bleakly. “Is that awful, Lucy Nan?”

  “Of course not! I don’t blame you. And naturally our circle will take care of dinner. Do you expect many relatives from out of town?”

  “I’ll have to let you know. Cal’s only sister lives in Orlando. She’s due in tomorrow—and my sister Myra will be here of course with her husband and two daughters. I’m looking for them this afternoon.” Poag shifted the dog to glance at his watch. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I have a more definite number, but right now I’d plan on about twenty or so. There’ll be plenty of room at our—at my place.” He smiled. “Cal would want the wine to flow and we can’t do that at the church. I want our friends to celebrate her life in a positive way—I just wish she could be here to enjoy it.”

  They parted at the corner. Poag, a dog under each arm, walked briskly in the direction of Sarah Bedford campus, and Lucy hurried back to her car, wondering if anyone had notified their circle chairman about the need for food. She turned once to glance at the man’s departing back. Although his pace was quick, his head was bowed and his usually straight shoulders now slumped forward.Poag Hemphill was not a large man but he kept himself in shape with tennis and swimming, and he and Calpernia often bicycled together. Their comfortable bungalow near the campus had been a gathering place for students as well as friends. He was going to need them now, Lucy thought as she stood looking after him. She knew from experience how devastating it was to lose one’s mate, but at least she had Roger and his family, as well as Julie (well, sort of) in her life. Poag had inherited only Blanche and Stella.

  “You’d better get started on your funeral cake,” Lucy told Ellis when she found her munching pumpkin muffins in the kitchen with Augusta. A pot of soup simmered on the stove and the ingredients for corn bread waited on the table. “I thought I’d wait and let you show me how you make it,” Augusta said, smoothing her apron. “Ellis said you like it a certain way.”

  “As long as it doesn’t have sugar in it,” Lucy said, measuring the cornmeal. “If I want something sweet, I’ll eat cake.”

  “Did you ask Idonia if she noticed anybody going upstairs when The Thursdays met here the other day?” Ellis asked. “I just can’t believe any of our friends would be rude enough to look in somebody else’s dresser drawers.”

  “Or if they were, they’d be careful not to leave such obvious evidence,” Lucy
said. “Whoever it was must have been in a heck of a hurry. Idonia didn’t notice a thing either, and she usually doesn’t miss much.

  “I saw Poag Hemphill this morning,” she told them. “They’re having the funeral Saturday afternoon.”

  “I know. Jo Nell called a while ago and enlisted both of us,” Ellis said. Jo Nell was chairman of the Letitia Jane Whitmire Circle, named for an early worker in the church whose stern countenance still looked down on them from the walls of the Ladies’ Parlor.

  Ellis lifted the lid of the soup pot, took a deep breath, and said, “Ahh!

  “So, how is Poag?” she asked.

  “Not so good, but then who would be? I’m afraid he’s in for a rough time,” Lucy said. “Funny thing, though…he doesn’t think Calpernia was murdered.”

  “I guess it would be hard to believe anyone would deliberately do away with somebody you care about,” Ellis said. “Unless that somebody happened to be Calpernia. I’ll have to admit, the woman’s tempted me more than once! Remember how she used to blot her lipstick all over our good linen napkins, Lucy Nan? And Nettie said she told her she sang off-key—standing right there in the sanctuary in the middle of the Gloria Patri!”

  Augusta looked up over her coffee cup. “Tsk, tsk!” she said. “Don’t perspire over inconsequential matters.”

  “What about Zee?” Ellis reminded her after she finished laughing. “Her complaint wasn’t exactly inconsequential.”

  What about Zee? Lucy wondered. And what was she doing during the time Calpernia was killed? And then she immediately felt ashamed for even thinking such a thing. This was the friend she’d known for most of her life. Zee St. Clair had her faults—and who didn’t? But murder wasn’t one of them. Was it?

  “Speaking of Zee,” she said, “wait until you hear about her breakfast guest!”

  “I wish he’d teach Bennett how to cook,” Ellis said, after she’d heard the details. “The man can’t seem to learn how to make toast.”

  “I suppose your guest has left?” Lucy said.

  Ellis frowned. “My guest? Oh, you mean Leonard? Left early this morning—and oh, I almost forgot; he left this behind. The police brought it by after the service yesterday, and I guess he didn’t want it.” She took a brown grocery bag from a chair by the door and brought out a worn leather purse. “Remember this?”

  Lucy nodded. “It belonged to Florence.” Just looking at the pathetic brown bag made her sad and she wondered why Ellis would bring it here to remind her.

  “I think they overlooked something when they went through her purse,” Ellis said. “I found this inside the lining.” And she reached into the handbag and brought out a small scrap of blue paper.

  “What is it?” Augusta asked, looking over Lucy’s shoulder.

  “A ticket stub,” Ellis said. “Poor little Florence came here on a bus.”

  Chapter Nine

  “It has a date on it—or part of one,” Lucy said, holding the paper to the light. “And what looks like the end of a word…somewhere in South Carolina.”

  “I believe it’s Stone’s Throw,” Augusta said. “Look: ESTHROW, S.C. Whoever printed the name of the town ran the two words together.” She looked at Ellis with her clear-eyed gaze. “Have the authorities seen this?”

  Ellis shook her head. “First I want to do a little sleuthing on my own. After all, they had their chance.”

  “I missed it, too, when I looked through her purse the day she came,” Lucy said. “A lipstick had slipped behind the lining, but I didn’t see the ticket stub. Did the police give you back the lipstick, too?” she asked Ellis. “It was pale pink—practically used up…”

  “It was in a box with some other things—mostly a lot of crushed snacks. Why?” Ellis frowned. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “The lipstick! Why didn’t I think of that before? Florence had on what I’d call a persimmon-color lipstick when she showed up here. It looked like she’d worn most of it off, but there was enough left for Nettie to notice it didn’t match her dress or her complexion—of course with the way she was acting, nothing surprised me.”

  “So where’s the other tube of lipstick?” Ellis said. “I’m almost sure I didn’t see it in the box.”

  “It wasn’t in her purse, either. I would’ve found that,” Lucy said.

  “Leonard said she probably left from somewhere in Chicago,” Ellis said. “That’s where the group was shopping when they discovered her missing from the mall. That would have been an awfully long bus trip. She’d have to travel through several states.”

  Augusta began to ladle up the steaming soup while Lucy took corn bread from the oven. “But where did she get off?” she asked.

  “I think we should pay a visit to the bus station and see if we can jar their memory,” Ellis said, tucking in a napkin. “But first, let’s eat!”

  The grizzled clerk with a gold tooth shook his head. “I been hearin’ ’bout that pore woman all week, but I done told the police I don’t recollect her gettin’ off here. If she left Chicago on October eighteenth, she’da been here the next day—that is, if she didn’t get off sooner.” He nodded toward a woman at the counter beside him who appeared to be seriously studying something in a magazine. “Maedean will tell you the same thing. You remember the police wantin’ to know ’bout that woman what was killed? Did you see her come through here?”

  Maedean looked up from her reading material—one of those women’s magazines, Lucy noted, whose cover always features some kind of miracle diet along with recipes like “Desserts to Kill for.” “Nope, and I would’a remembered, too, because that’s my mama’s birthday and I was looking for my Aunt Myrtle to come in that day from Knoxville.” She sipped from a mug of coffee. “Nobody got off the bus here that looked like that.”

  “Then she must have gotten off before the bus reached here,” Augusta said when Lucy reached home. “Did you ask about the driver? Maybe he’ll remember her?”

  “I did. It wasn’t the regular driver. The clerk said it was a substitute that day but he’d try and see if he could get in touch with him. I’m not holding my breath.”

  Augusta paused to wipe a streak of dirt from her face. Lucy had found her on the back steps repotting pansies. “You have too many in one planter. The poor little things can’t breathe,” Augusta told her, gently patting soil around the seedlings. “I should think the police could follow up on that,” she said. “Did Ellis give them the ticket stub?”

  “She’s on her way there—or so she says. The police had returned my coat to Leonard, too, but I asked Ellis to pass it along to The Salvation Army.” Lucy sat on the steps beside Augusta and fingered a velvety blossom. She never wanted to see that coat again.

  The wind that had picked up earlier in the day was calm now and the two of them sat in a patch of sun on the weathered back steps. Augusta hummed as she worked and Lucy was content to sit and watch the last of the golden hickory leaves cling to the tree by the summerhouse. She and Charlie had sometimes picnicked there on mild autumn days, and Julie had entertained her little friends there with tea parties. It looked sad now and lonely. Lucy had always loved spending time in her special place, but after Charlie died, she rarely went there anymore.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself! she told herself. Maybe it’s time to look for another job outside the home, or for an adult who needs help learning to read!

  Lucy sniffed. Something smelled wonderful. “Are you baking strawberry bread or something?” she asked, “or is that some kind of perfume?”

  Augusta had moved to a small circular flower bed in the center of the driveway where a pool of blue pansies nodded. The flowers looked larger and their colors more vibrant than they had earlier, Lucy thought.

  The angel’s dazzling necklace seemed to reflect the color of the pansies, winking from purple to violet to the blue of the October sky. “I suppose it’s because I worked in the strawberry fields,” she said, lightly touching a wilting leaf. The leaf perked up at once. “The sce
nt seems to stay with me here.”

  “Strawberry fields? Where?”

  “In heaven, of course. Can you imagine heaven without them? And now and then I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the flower gardens as well. What a heavenly duty that was! You should see, them, Lucy Nan: acres and acres of flowers of every color and variety. No perfume on earth can equal it!”

  “That must be why you have such a magic touch,” Lucy said as she rose to go inside.

  Augusta laughed. “I suppose you could describe it that way.” She put away her gardening tools and followed her into the house, still humming.

  “What’s that tune you keep humming? Is it a hymn or something? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”

  “No, I doubt if you have. I learned it when I was here on assignment in the 1940s during what you refer to as World War Two. It’s called ‘Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.’ Rather catchy, don’t you think? I can’t seem to get it out of my head.”

  “That figures,” Lucy said.

  Bellawood, former home of Poindexter G. Potts, Confederate veteran and onetime governor of South Carolina, sat on a wooded knoll at the edge of once-fertile river-bottom acreage about ten miles south of Stone’s Throw. Although during its working years it technically had been a plantation, the modest two-story house didn’t look anything like Margaret Mitchell’s Tara but was a simple clapboard farmhouse that was said to have been built in the mid-1850s. During the Victorian era, its owners added gingerbread trim to the wide front porch and tacked an ornate circular towerlike room onto one corner.

  Lucy, bumping along the asphalt road in the school activities bus along with Teddy, his twenty-three kindergarten classmates, their teacher, and three other adult chaperones, cheered with the others when the bus turned onto the curving oak-lined lane that led to the farm.

  “When do we get to pick cotton, Mama Lucy?” her grandson asked, bouncing in his seat.