No wonder she worried about money.
“Figured Harden always knew she was too good for him.” He gave a sad-puppy bob of his head, then roused himself from his ruminations. “I’d best get to work.”
“Thanks again, Mr. Mack.” I watched from the doorway and waved as he pulled his long legs into his pickup truck. A husband who wouldn’t insure his life, who ordered his own outrageously expensive grave marker, and who used that marker to accuse his wife of murder. Dear Lord.
The afternoon’s conversations tumbled around in my head while my hands tackled the door locks. I couldn’t get my mind off Maggy Avinger and the glimpse Mr. Mack had given me into her life. My heart hurt for her.
The wood in the door frames was old, dry, and tough to drill. To get the latches and locks lined up in the French doors required shimming one of the hinges to correct for a slight warping in the door, then I filed the faceplate opening so the latch would catch. Buying new doors would have been much easier, but that would’ve forced me to endure another of Melvin’s lectures on the value of architectural integrity.
By late afternoon, I was no closer to a solution for Maggy’s problems but my office and Melvin’s had lockable doors off the house’s main hallway. Neither of the two former tenants—first the Bertram family, and later the Baldwin & Bates Funeral Home—had needed to lock the front parlors, but I now felt more secure.
I put Melvin’s new keys on his desk with a note. Not that he could overlook them on the uncluttered leather blotter centered on the spotless expanse of desk.
As I’d wrestled with the locks, I’d argued with myself over how to deal with Maggy’s problems. I was sure Mom and Dad could give me some much-needed background, though I’d have to be careful not to breach client confidentiality with a careless slip. I was realizing just how tricky that could be in a small town like Dacus. On the other hand, if everybody already knows something, is it really confidential?
My six-year-old niece, Emma, was supposed to stay with Mom and Dad tonight while my sister, Lydia, and her husband, Frank, rehearsed for an opera workshop production of The Mikado. Several professors and students were driving over from the university to lend their professional talents. Even with professional help, I suspected the Town of Titipu would still be populated with thick Southern accents. Light opera, sure, but shouldn’t dramatic integrity demand verisimilitude?
If I hurried, I could invite myself to dinner and visit with Emma to see what sort of off-center observations she had on the world. As an afterthought, I grabbed up the papers Maggy had left about the plant rescue before I turned the key in my brand-new lock and went out the back door. Melvin hadn’t said where he was going—not that he reported in with me—so I locked the back door, too.
Plant rescue operation? What the heck is that?” My dad peered at Maggy’s information through his reading glasses. Technically, he now owns the Dacus newspaper, but that doesn’t mean he knows what’s going on.
“Honey, I told you about that. Keena Brown and Maggy Avinger organized it. To rescue native plant species ahead of that new housing development going in, up above Walnut Grove campground. On Dot Downing’s property. Apparently Dot’s sold it to some developer.”
“Mm-hmm,” my dad said noncommittally studying the papers.
“You going, Mom?” I lifted a square of lasagna onto a plate, and Emma carried it to the table.
“I might join them later in the day. I work the First Fruits Food Bank in the morning. You ought to go up. Keena Brown has a business that salvages native plants and encourages people to use them in their landscaping. I never realized how many of the trees and shrubs we use originally came from Japan or China. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Harrumph.” Great-aunt Aletha—Letha for short—expressively summed up her feelings on the subject. She poured a glass of milk for Emma and put the carton back in the refrigerator. “Folks—and shrubs—ought to stay where they’re planted. Nothing grows well away from its own home.”
“Now, Aunt Letha. You know that’s not entirely true.” Mom said, tossing the salad. “Those gorgeous hollies you have outside your kitchen window aren’t natives, but they sure seem to like it here.”
Aunt Letha shot Mom one of her don’t-prove-your-rules-with-my-exceptions looks and took a seat at the head of the table awaiting the start of the meal.
“Avery, you would enjoy getting to know Keena,” Mom said. “She’s led an interesting life, following her husband’s career around the world.”
“According to this”—Dad was still reading—“maybe twenty to twenty-five percent of the native plants around here are either rare or endangered? Never would’ve thought it’d be that many.”
Aunt Letha snorted. “And exactly what are we in danger of losing that we really need? Precious little, I would imagine. What? Some subspecies of a chigger-weed? Big loss there. The English might like giant weeds and pollen breeders jumbling up their front yards, but I don’t see that catching on around here. Folks here got sense enough to call a weed a weed and pull it up by its roots.”
Nobody bothered responding. Mom, Emma, and I joined Aunt Letha and Dad at the table. Dad laid the paper aside and said grace over the food before reporting more information garnered from Keena’s material that I hadn’t bothered to read.
“I knew these plants were old-time remedies, but I didn’t know some were now used commercially. Seems like those should be cultivated.” Dad’s engineering bias believes everything ought to have a rational solution or use.
“What’s this development that’s going in?” Mom asked. “The first I’d heard about it was when Maggy called about the plant rescue.”
Everyone looked around, waiting for someone else to pipe up. Dad finally shrugged and said, “Heard something about a big golf community going in up there. That didn’t make sense, though. Not enough flat ground up in there for a Putt-Putt miniature course or even a putting green.”
“You can sell Yankees cockleburs and they’ll sit around waiting for the baby porcupines to hatch out,” Aunt Letha said.
Emma, sitting across from me, caught my eye. She took a sip of her milk to hide her smile.
“Speaking of Maggy,” I said, changing the subject, “did you all know her husband?” I shoveled in a bite of whole-wheat lasagna and waited for my background research to come to me.
“We were in Rotary together for a while,” Dad said. “He was right regular to come, when he had his accounting firm, but—”
“So’s he could get you all as clients,” Aunt Letha interjected.
“—he took sick soon after he sold his business and he quit coming.”
“Been dead a long time ago if he’d died when he ought.”
“Aunt Letha.” Mom gently reproved her while glancing at Emma, hoping Letha would recall that a member of the tell-everything-I-hear club sat among us.
“You know it’s true.” Aunt Letha, undeterred, stated her case. “He treated his wife shamefully, his sales tactics were questionable at best, he squeezed nickels until they screamed in pain, and he coated it all with that shallow, saccharine hail-fellow-well-met act. Give me an out-and-out rounder anyday over one who dresses it up in sheep’s wool.”
“How long was he sick?” I asked, ignoring Mom’s look.
“Morally? His whole life. Certainly from grade school on,” Letha pronounced, a former American history teacher who also knew the personal history of most everyone in town. “Physically? He was sick two, maybe three years.”
Emma and I both sat there chewing and taking it all in, each of us for our own reasons.
Mom just frowned. “Avery, could you come help me get the fruit cups?”
“Sure.” I scooped the last bit of salad into my mouth and pushed back my chair.
When we got into the kitchen, Mom set her plate in the sink and turned to face me. “The conversation about Harden reminded me about a promise I’d made.”
“Ma’am?” I’d expected a mild lecture.
Instead of g
oing to the refrigerator for the fruit, she opened a drawer in the kitchen desk.
“Mr. Mack came to talk to me this afternoon, wondering if you could give him some advice.”
From a file folder lying on top of the drawer’s miscellany, she pulled a small newspaper clipping.
“Mack got this in the mail last week. Couldn’t bring himself to throw it away but didn’t know what to do about it and couldn’t bear to keep it in the house.”
Even though everyone called Henry MacGregor “Mack,” Mom sometimes still calls him Mr. Mack around me and my sister, as she did when we were kids and she was trying to teach us the proper way to address adults. Thanks to her persistence, I still called him Mr. Mack.
I didn’t mention his visit to the office.
The clipping was a banana pudding recipe. I had to turn the clipping around in circles to read the words as they turned the corners and filled the margins:
Stay away from Maggy Avinger’s banana pudding. Her
husband didn’t survive his last meal, you know.
I looked up at Mom, who stood propped against the sink.
“He got this last week?”
“I think so. It had to be sometime recently, after Harden Avinger passed. I told Mack to pay it no never mind, but I wanted to see if you could talk to him.”
“About what?” About what, indeed. My brain flooded with oh-nos and what-ifs. Did she really do it? Had Harden somehow come back from the grave to scribble on a newspaper clipping? Could there be two people that mean? Or had somebody found out about Harden’s sick joke and decided to fan the flame?
Mom shrugged. “Just reassure him. When he came by to talk to you today, he thought you were too busy. I tried to tell him you weren’t, but he wasn’t hearing any of that. You’re a lawyer and he might listen when you tell him to just ignore this nonsense. Somebody who hasn’t got gumption enough to sign a name hasn’t said anything that deserves hearing.”
“Did he bring the envelope it came in?”
Mom pulled it out of the drawer. I studied it. Postmarked Upstate South Carolina and dated last week. Harden couldn’t have sent it; he was already dead. So who did?
The handwriting was shaky and cramped. Of course, the clipping’s margins didn’t allow much space to write in. No date on the clipping, but the typeface looked like the Clarion’s. Guess I could check to see if they’d run a banana pudding recipe and when, but I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish.
“I’ll talk to him. I’m just not sure what to say.”
That satisfied Mom. She turned to the refrigerator and pulled out the bowl of diced fruit.
She could be satisfied, passing it along. She didn’t know about Harden Avinger’s eight-foot-tall accusation, coming soon to a neighborhood cemetery.
Mom pushed through the swinging door to the dining room carrying the large bowl. I followed with the dessert bowls, chewing my bottom lip.
“Aunt Letha, where did you say Aunt Vinnia and Aunt Hattie were going this evening?” Mom asked as she ladled up dessert. Emma and I exchanged glances, both of us disappointed that dessert turned out to be something healthy.
Letha wiped her mouth, the generous cloth napkin dainty in her large hand. “To see some picture show, with some other old farts. Can’t stand the fare at the picture houses myself. Some tearjerker about a guy with dementia. Don’t know what’s entertaining about that. Besides, half that crowd won’t remember what happened by the time they get home.”
Aunt Letha is the oldest of my late grandfather’s three baby sisters—and by far the oldest in the crowd of “old farts” her sisters had gone out on the town with. No one dared mention that. Mom didn’t bother shushing her in front of Emma. Sometimes that just eggs Aunt Letha on. Besides, Emma had heard it all before.
Mom tried again to change the topic. “Are you going to the plant rescue tomorrow morning?”
“I might,” I said.
Even though it was still March, it would be nice to be outdoors.
“You need to come by the house and pick up Bud, then. Take him with you,” Aunt Letha said.
“Ma’am?” My eyebrows shot up.
‘Take Bud with you, if you’re going to be wandering around some desolate patch of woods.”
“Bud hates hiking.” Or just walking. Letha’s Rottweiler likes his people settled and within his watchful eyeshot, preferably somewhere near his food bowl.
“He loves being outside. And you don’t need to be wandering around up there without protection.”
No point asking her who would protect the plant rescuers from Bud. He likes attention, doesn’t like people moving quickly, talking loudly, or not paying attention to him, and is rather insistent on getting his way.
My dad bit his bottom lip and tried, not successfully, to hide his amusement. He didn’t even attempt to rescue me, content to watch the inevitable unfold.
3
Saturday Morning
Saturday morning, I aimed the nose of my 1964 Vi Mustang up the mountain. Bud eyed me hatefully as he scrunched into the blanket protecting the backseat upholstery from his toenails.
A mile or so outside town, Main Street becomes a two-lane state road and takes a sharp turn as it begins its ascent into the Blue Ridge, the southern end of the Appalachian chain. I love the abruptness of the climb and the sharp turns on the first stretch, where I know without a doubt I’m in the hills. I downshifted and pushed the accelerator. I heard Bud nestle down into the seat for the ride, happier than I was that we were sharing our journey.
I was concentrating on the series of sharp curves when a blue light popped in my rearview mirror.
A cop? On this road? I slowed and rode the right side of the lane so he could pass on the short straight stretch. In the mirror, I could see him making agitated pull-over hand gestures.
You gotta be kidding. Cops never clocked speed on this road. I had to drive another half mile before I could pull into a narrow gravel road, my stomach knotted in that irrational kindergartner-mad fit I get whenever a cop pulls me over.
The deputy took his time sauntering up to my window. His ears stuck out wide under his Smokey Bear hat, and he looked about sixteen years old.
“Ma’am, you have any idea how fast—shee-ut!”
With a roar, Bud rammed his gallon-bucket-sized head through the quart-sized window opening behind my seat. The deputy skittered in the gravel, backing away from the car, and almost fell. When he was safely out of Bud’s reach, a slant-eyed anger replaced his wide-eyed fright.
“Get your dog under control. Now!” His hand rested on his pistol butt.
“Bud! Bud!” I couldn’t get twisted around in the bucket seat to grab his collar, and his deep-throated barks drilled painfully into my head. Bud was enjoying this—he had something on the run, and he hadn’t even broken a sweat.
I could no longer see the deputy in the side mirrors; he’d moved behind the car, squawking into his shoulder radio for backup, Officer threatened.
“He won’t hurt you,” I called out the window, struggling to reassure Officer Uptight and conk Bud on the nose at the same time. I didn’t dare open the door so I could get hold of Bud. This guy was proving to be way more entertainment than Bud had enjoyed in a while. The car rocked menacingly as he barked and lunged.
“Get your dog under control! I’m warning you!”
“Officer—” I managed to twist around with my knees in the seat and reach between the bucket seats to grab Bud’s collar. Bud rolled his eyes at me, as if to say, This is fun, isn’t it? He gave another throaty roar.
Through the back window, I saw the car carrying Officer Scaredy’s backup whip off the main road behind us. That was quick.
Oh, no. Deputy Rudy Mellin’s familiar shape emerged from behind the driver’s door, a smirk on his face and his hand on his gun belt.
The junior deputy danced around on first one foot, then the other, regaling Rudy with a roster of my offenses. I bent over the seat and wrestled with Bud’s collar, trying
unsuccessfully to pull his massive head back in the window and wishing I could evaporate.
Rudy stepped up to my window and leaned over so he could look me in the eye—and study my rear end. He cupped Bud’s head, scratching his ears with one hand and smoothing his throat with the other. Rudy’s cooing sounds hushed Bud’s barking and set his giant Tater Tot tail wagging.
“Exceeding the speed limit in excess of fifteen miles an hour. Threatening an officer with grievous bodily harm. Failing to comply with an officer’s request to stand down. Tsk-tsk-tsk.”
“Stand down? Nobody said stand down. What the heck does that mean, stand down?”
Rudy studied my jean-clad rump to further irk me, and smiled. “Busy this morning, aren’t we, counselor?” He kept rubbing Bud’s ears.
I glared at him. This was all Aunt Letha’s fault.
Rudy turned to the deputy, who had taken a brave step closer to the back of the car. Bud eyed him, but was too happy with the ear-scratching to take up a now-old game.
“Officer Caudle, I think this situation’s under control. You may resume patrol.”
“But I witnessed her speeding. And—”
“Deputy. I have this matter in hand now.”
Bud hassled happily.
Junior stared at Rudy a couple of beats too long, mentally searching for some way to legitimately defy him. I was his big catch for the day—heck, for his whole career so far—and he knew Rudy was declaring a catch-and-release day.
Rudy’s rank meant Junior couldn’t even sputter with indignation, so he huffed back to his car. After maneuvering forward and back a few times to get unsand-wiched from between Rudy’s cruiser and my car, he couldn’t resist spraying a little gravel as his tires barked back onto the paved two-lane heading for town.
I turned loose of Bud’s collar and slid back down in the driver’s seat. Bud was too enamored to eat Rudy and save me from a lecture.
“A’vry, you gotta slow this crate down.”
“I wasn’t going that fast. How would he even know how fast I was going? The Sheriff’s Department doesn’t have—”
Hog Wild Page 3
