We rode along in silence until Flo said, “Have you any idea what you’ll do, Emma?”
“I’ll try for another job. If I don’t get one, then I may starve.”
“Oh, surely it’s not that serious,” I said.
“Well, not quite. I have about ten dollars saved. And if the worst came, I could go to Chicago and live with a cousin—if she’d take me. But Ann has four children and can’t afford to help me much.”
“Maybe Dad could use you at the newspaper office,” I said. “Can you run a typewriter?”
Emma shook her head.
“It’s very kind of you, Jane, but I am not trained for newspaper work.”
“Perhaps you could find a position as companion to someone,” suggested Florence. “Didn’t you study French and music.”
“I’d like such a job,” said Emma. “Unfortunately, I can’t locate any. I do know of a place where I might find housework.”
She opened her purse and withdrew a clipping torn from the morning edition of the Greenville Examiner.
“Wanted—girl for general housework,” Emma read aloud. “Board, room, $2.50 a week. Apply at Old Mansion, White Falls.”
“The pay isn’t very high,” I said.
“No, but with my room and board, I’d not have many expenses. Unfortunately, I can’t apply for the place because the bus doesn’t run down that way.”
“My bus does,” I said. “I’ll take you to White Falls if you want to go there.”
“I’d be grateful.”
“How soon can you be ready?”
“Not more than twenty minutes. It won’t take me long to pack my suitcase.”
I dropped Emma off at her rooming house on Bancroft, promising to return for her in a very few minutes.
If we were heading off as far as White Falls, we really ought to let somebody know where we were going. I’ve learned from hard experience that even though I may be a grown woman of twenty-four when I don’t turn up for meals on time, Dad—not to mention Mrs. Timms, our housekeeper—tends to fear the worst. I stopped off at home intending to inform Mrs. Timms, but she was out, so I telephoned my father at the Examiner office.
“What time do you expect to get back from White Falls?”
“Probably not until after dark,” I said. “Please let Mrs. Timms know I’ll not be home for dinner, Dad.”
“You’ll be missing out on her black pepper chicken, you know,” Dad said, “and who knows what other assaults on the stomach lining. Mrs. Timms got another package from her sister in Calcutta today, and I’ve no doubt it was packed to the brim with spices.”
Mrs. Timms, who hasn’t traveled outside a fifty-mile radius of the city of Greenville more than a handful of times in her fifty-three years of life—and then only to go as far away as Chicago—has a sister Henrietta who married a diplomat. Henrietta has made it her mission in life to make Mrs. Timms’ vicarious experience of her own world travels as vivid as possible. This is how our household came to—as Dad puts it—consume more spices per annum than the entire subcontinent of India. I’ve grown to love Mrs. Timms’ curries, but my father has never adjusted. The odd thing is, I’ve been expressly forbidden to breath a word of the discomfort my father endures on account of his over-spiced diet. I suspect my father harbors feelings for the widowed Mrs. Timms which are far deeper than ordinary friendship.
But then Mrs. Timms is no ordinary housekeeper. My mother died when I was ten, so she’s practically raised me since. They have a lot in common: Mrs. Timms and Dad. My father is disappointed in me because I refuse to become a member of staff on his newspaper, and Mrs. Timms is disappointed in me because she never managed to turn me into a proper lady who doesn’t go out with tears in her stockings and remembers to apply a conservative coating of lipstick.
Dad and Mrs. Timms did somehow succeed in marrying me off—despite my apparently slovenly ways—to a lovely newspaperman by the name of Timothy Carter. That’s how I came to be Mrs. Carter, relict of the late Timothy Carter. We only lasted a year before Timothy committed the unpardonable sin of going down a dark alley in hot pursuit of a scoop and subsequently coming between a mafia hitman’s bullet and his intended victim. Now I’m a widow and absolutely determined that if I do end up center-aisling it a second time, it won’t be with another newspaperman.
“I’ll tell Mrs. Timms that you won’t be home for supper,” my father promised. “Drive carefully, Jane.”
After that, we stopped off at Flo’s. Her mother was still out, ostensibly maintaining order and decorum amongst the ranks of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The Reverend Sidney Radcliff was in his study, knee deep in wadded-up writing paper and cigar butts.
“When are you going to break down and get a typewriter to compose your sermons?” I asked by way of greeting.
Revered Radcliff just laughed. I think that now, even if he saw the light and wanted a typewriter, he’d refuse to modernize just to spite me.
“Where are you going again?” he asked absently, even though Flo had already told him twice.
“White Falls.”
“Oh, yes,” said Reverend Radcliff. “Used to have an aunt who lived there. Nice little hamlet, at least the bit of it that hasn’t yet washed into the river.”
When we returned to Bancroft Street, we found Emma waiting on the front porch with her suitcase. The luggage stowed the back seat, we drove out the south road which led through fifteen miles of rolling country to the town of White Falls, located on the bank of the Grassy River.
During the ride, Emma was by turns talkative and morose. I supposed Flo and I were sympathetic listeners because Emma told us all about her difficulties since graduating from school. Her parents had left her with more debts than money, and after the estate had been settled, nothing had been left. She had worked in a drug store, in a restaurant, and as a nanny, but none of those positions had proven satisfactory.
“I haven’t been very lucky,” she said. “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if this housekeeping job is gone before we get to White Falls.”
“We’ll hope not,” I said.
I worried we might be delayed by a rain storm. Clouds scudded like sailboats across the sky. I called Florence’s attention to them, but she said, “Oh, the sun is shining. It won’t rain for hours.”
However, before we had covered two-thirds of the distance to White Falls, the gathering clouds blotted out the last patch of blue. Florence rolled up the car windows to protect us from the chill wind. It grew darker, and flashes of lightning crackled across the sky.
“Will we reach White Falls before it breaks?” Emma asked.
“Not a chance,” I said. “The rain is coming now.”
A great white sheet of rain approached from the direction of the Grassy River. A few drops of rain splattered the windshield, and then a deluge descended. The pavement became a lake, and I could not see more than ten feet beyond the headlights.
“This is a regular cloudburst!” I said, slowing Bouncing Betsy to a crawl.
“Maybe we should pull up under a tree,” Flo suggested. “You’re apt to run off the road.”
“If I stop and shut off the motor, the engine wires may get so wet from this driving rain that we won’t be able to get it started again until the storm is over,” I said. “I believe it’s better to keep going.”
Before Bouncing Betsy had traveled very much farther, it became apparent to me that my decision had been unwise. The rain was coming down harder. A coughing gasp from the engine warned that the motor might die anytime. We were going to be stranded in the middle of the road.
“We’ll have to pull up somewhere,” I said.
“I see a building just ahead.” Florence peered through the rain-splattered glass. “It looks like a shed.”
“And the door is open, or rather there isn’t any door!” I said. “A welcome port in a storm!”
I turned the car into the dirt track leading off the roadway and drove into the shed.
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Peril at the Pink Lotus: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy (Book One) (Jane Carter Historical Cozy Mysteries 1) Page 16
