An Angel to Die For

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “But only for now, you said?”

  “Right again. I’m a temp. I’ll be filling in for Lillian until they find a permanent replacement. Lillian’s been promoted.” Augusta’s face fairly glowed. “She’s singing in the choir!”

  “The heavenly choir, I suppose?”

  “The very same. I’ll be around until they decide on the right one to take her place. Usually I’m assigned to the strawberry fields,” she said.

  “Weeding them?”

  “Oh, no! Weeds don’t grow in heaven. Picking them mostly. And I sometimes work with flowers as well.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, although I did detect a sweet berry scent. “Then maybe you can tell me who moved Uncle Faris.”

  From the look on her face, I could see she hadn’t made his acquaintance. I wasn’t surprised. Aunt Zorah always said he’d gone the other direction.

  I told her what I’d found in the family burying ground.

  She fished a dog-eared notepad from a huge tapestry bag I hadn’t noticed before and scribbled something on it. “Uncle Faris. We’ll get to him in time. But aren’t there more urgent concerns?”

  I took a deep breath as she leaned closer, and the room smelled of lavender and something else, something clean and fresh and new like the first day of spring.

  I nodded. “My sister. Where is Maggie? Why did she have to die? And my dad . . . I hope they’re speaking now.”

  Augusta reached out and touched my hand. “I’m sure they are. I rarely see the newcomers, Prentice, but everything’s right up there. It’s down here that concerns me.”

  It concerned me too, but not enough to keep me awake. After weeks of restless nights, I felt as though I could sleep forever. I didn’t even bother to go upstairs, but curled on the couch wrapped in my grandmother’s faded afghan. Just before I closed my eyes I remembered I hadn’t phoned Aunt Zorah or the sheriff. The wind slammed shutters against the house, and surges of dark rain pounded the windows. Tomorrow would have to do. It seemed a shame to bring anyone out on a night like this for somebody who had been dead for more than twenty-five years.

  As I drifted off, I heard Augusta singing that same song in the kitchen as she tidied up after our unusual supper. It was the tune she’d been humming earlier. Then, except for Noodles purring at my feet, the house grew still.

  Augusta Goodnight, guardian angel. Surely I had dreamed her; when I woke in the morning, she would be gone. Yet embers still glowed red in the grate, and the taste of chocolate lingered on my tongue.

  CHAPTER TWO

  You’ll never guess what I dreamed last night,” I would tell my friend Dottie when I called. And she would burst forth with her froggy laugh and say something silly like, “How about dreaming me up an angel with money? We’ll need big bucks to get Martha up and running again.”

  I missed Dottie Ives. She always made me laugh, and I knew I’d find her at home because as editor of the “late” Martha’s Journal, she didn’t have a job either. I pulled the soft old afghan a little closer, stuck a tentative foot from under the cover, and opened one eye. Sun glinted off the brass fender in front of the fireplace and made a yellow path across the floor. I hadn’t seen that fender looking as bright since Dad made me polish it every week for staying out too late back in junior high. The rich wake-up aroma of coffee wrapped itself around me and I sat up and sniffed. A wholesome, start-the-day-off-right smell came from the kitchen, and I knew the cowgirl with angelic delusions wasn’t a figment of my imagination after all. I wasn’t sure if I should be glad or disappointed. I was sure I was hungry.

  The muffins were bran with walnuts, dates, and a slight tang of oranges. They were sweetened with honey, Augusta said, and she served them with a bowl of fresh peaches, cantaloupe, and strawberries that must have come from heaven. I didn’t ask.

  Today Augusta wore an emerald skirt with a liquid green sheen that might have been fashioned from lake water. Her blouse was a soft, shimmering yellow, and the necklace, an iridescent rainbow, glinted in the morning light. Its brilliance fascinated me, and I had to force myself to look away. The ensemble was tied at the waist with a filmy, chiffonlike scarf that trailed behind her when she walked. Her boots, I noticed, had been replaced with something that looked like silvery ballet slippers.

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll trip on that?” I asked, letting her scarf trail over my hand. It felt like air. “What happened to Dale Evans?”

  She twirled about, and I was reminded of the Sugar Plum Fairy—but only briefly. Augusta’s not nearly as dainty. “I’ve had my fill of tailored clothing,” she said. “There was a shortage of nearly everything—including fabric—during my stay here in the forties, and on my last assignment, I hardly had time to dwell on secular things.”

  She smoothed her secular skirt, rose on her secular toes, and sighed happily. “It’s time for a change, and this suits me, don’t you think? Makes me feel like floating.”

  “I thought angels flew,” I said, dodging as the skirt whirled past.

  “Only when it’s necessary.” She smiled at me over the coffeepot. “Drink up now. Morning’s half gone.”

  I groaned. It was barely eight o’clock. The first thing I needed to do, I decided, as Augusta joined me in a second cup of coffee, was phone Aunt Zorah about Uncle Faris’s sudden disappearance. Maybe she would know what had happened.

  “I imagine you’ll be speaking with your aunt this morning,” Augusta said brightly. “About your uncle’s grave?” She raised an elegant eyebrow as if she expected an answer. I grunted. I’d be darned if I’d give her one. I ate another muffin oozing with strawberry jam.

  After breakfast I phoned Aunt Zorah at the library in Liberty Bend where she has reigned for the last forty years and told her about Uncle Faris. For a moment there was only silence at her end. I was afraid I’d upset her.

  “He’s what?” Was Aunt Zorah laughing? “Prentice, are you sure?”

  It would have been hard to pass over something as big and unsettling as an empty grave, but I tried to be tactful. “At first I thought you might have had him moved,” I said. “But I’m sure Mom would’ve told me—and the stone—well, it was still there.” I couldn’t bring myself to describe the ghastly reality of the scene, even if the two hadn’t been especially cozy when Uncle Faris took the dive off Poindexter’s Point.

  Aunt Zorah muttered something about That Fool still giving her trouble. “I’d check with Simmons and Griggs at the funeral home before calling the police, Prentice. Your mother and I have discussed having Faris moved to the upper part of the cemetery, but we hadn’t—excuse me—No, no Hollis, we don’t climb on the library shelves. Get down this minute! As I was saying, we hadn’t made definite plans. They’re building a road through there, you know, and I’m not sure about the property line.” Her voice softened. “I wouldn’t mention this just yet to your mother. Virginia’s been through enough lately.”

  I knew my mother had already sold her share of the estate to a developer, and the back part of the property would be divided into one-acre lots. Dad’s life insurance policy had been a modest one, and this was about the only way she could get by, she said. Besides, Mom always disliked the loneliness of living “so far from town,” although it was only a little over six miles to Liberty Bend. The other part of the farm, including the house, I was to share with Maggie. I only wish my sister could have known before she died that our father still claimed her as an heir.

  As a small child, Maggie was always about three steps behind Dad wherever he went, followed by a menagerie of animals, since she collected every stray that came around. When she asked for a pony for her fifth birthday, Dad bought her a Shetland and taught her to ride. “How come I never got a pony?” I asked, wishing at that moment my little sister would ride off into the sunset and stay until she was at least thirty.

  “Why, Jemima Puddleduck!” my dad said, laughing, “you never asked for one.” But Maggie never cared for the rough elements of farming as I did. Digging potatoes was like a tr
easure hunt for me, and I liked keeping weeds from the neat rows of vegetables in our family garden while my sister rescued baby rabbits and dressed kittens in doll clothes.

  Clyde Simmons of Simmons and Griggs momentarily lost his staid undertaker’s demeanor when I called and told him about the grave. “You mean it’s gone? They haven’t already moved it, have they? I didn’t think your aunt had decided about that for sure.”

  I told him if they’d moved Uncle Faris, I didn’t know where they’d put him.

  “Dear God in heaven! Don’t tell me this is happening again. Had a wave of freakish incidents like that about seven or eight years ago—high school kids into some kind of cult silliness—but the sheriff put an end to that. Sounds like a new crop of meanness brewing.

  “Your mom did come to see me a few weeks ago about the possibility of having that grave moved when they put a road through there,” he added. “Not a bad thing, really. I’ve noticed that lower part of your lot’s been eroding. Too much wash comes down. I told Virginia we’d do it whenever Zorah gave the word; your mother said she’d let us know.” His voice became soothing, more in-charge. “I hope you’ve notified the sheriff about this, Prentice. Somebody’s up to something worse than mischief here.” He hesitated. “And don’t you be going back over there alone.”

  I sat at the oak trestle table in a spot of winter sun and turned my coffee mug in my hands while Noodles washed her paws on the hearth. What if whoever was doing this came back again? Maybe next time for Dad or Maggie. Or me. I felt sick as I phoned the sheriff.

  “Mighty good coffee,” Deputy Weber said, shoving his cup aside. Again I sat at the kitchen table, this time with the policeman across from me in the place my sister used to sit. “Now, when was the last time you were in that area where we saw the grave?”

  “The last of December when we buried my sister,” I said. “The twenty-ninth.”

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it. Donald Weber had been in the class several years ahead of ours and had married a friend of mine soon after high school. I thought him good-looking then, and he was still attractive although he was beginning to lose his hair.

  “And you haven’t been back since then?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to go there. “I’ve only been home a few days,” I said, explaining that I’d been living in Atlanta. “But my mother was here until about two weeks ago when they got my sister’s stone in place. I’m sure she would’ve seen something as obvious as that.”

  “Hard to tell because of yesterday’s rain, and we had that hard freeze last week. Any footprints would’ve been washed away, but I believe this happened within the last couple of days.” He flicked a look at me. “You might’ve interrupted something, you know.”

  I nodded. I didn’t need reminding.

  He frowned. “And there’s nobody here but you?”

  I could hear Augusta rocking in my mother’s old cane-bottomed chair in the parlor, but the deputy must not have noticed. “My mother’s staying in Savannah for a while,” I told him, “and the house has been closed for a couple of weeks.”

  “You haven’t noticed anyone around who shouldn’t be?”

  I started to tell him about Augusta, but I didn’t want to share her. Not yet. Maybe it was for the same reason I hadn’t mentioned her to Aunt Zorah. If Augusta Goodnight had sinister motives, I wasn’t ready to deal with it.

  “When I first got here I found that sorry Jasper Totherow making himself at home in our barn,” I told him. “Claimed my mother asked him to keep an eye on the house, but I know better.” I picked up the saltshaker—the one shaped like a rabbit I had bought at the dime store when I was eight—and brought it down hard on the table. “I told him to take a hike!”

  “Have you told your mother about this?” He glanced about the room.

  “In a roundabout way. Didn’t want to alarm her. I did check to see if she’d asked anybody to keep an eye on the place, and she said Suzie Wright promised to have a look around when she came by to feed the cat.

  “Suzie delivers our mail,” I explained. “Lives about a mile down the road.”

  “Jasper Totherow. He is bad news,” the deputy said. “Wife finally filed a complaint against him, learned the hard way, I reckon. Wish I had a dollar for every time we’ve been called out to their place.”

  Ralphine Totherow rented a small house a few miles away and supported the couple’s two children by cleaning other people’s houses, including ours from time to time. I remembered Mom telling me she had her out to Smokerise just before Christmas. After Dad died, she didn’t have the heart for the usual holiday flurry, she said. And that was probably the last time the house had been cleaned, I thought. Until Augusta came. From what my mother told me, Ralphine Totherow didn’t receive any financial help from her husband. Didn’t want it, she said. All she wanted was to be rid of him.

  “That man’s trouble. I’d be mighty careful around him.” The deputy went to the window, zipping his jacket as he stood looking down the long, curving drive. After returning from the grave site earlier, he’d called for another policeman, his radio crackling. “If we can’t get prints, we can at least get pictures,” he said, explaining that Sergeant Sloan would be bringing a camera.

  “Do you think Jasper had anything to do with what happened to Uncle Faris?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Who knows what Jasper might do?”

  “But why?”

  “To get even maybe. Or for just plain meanness. We’ll be having words with that one—as soon as we can chase him down.”

  But mean and shiftless as he was, I couldn’t imagine Jasper Totherow exerting enough energy to dig up a grave—unless, of course, he was being paid for his efforts.

  Behind us in the dining room I heard Augusta humming, and from the doorway I could see her, stretching on tiptoe to reach into far corners with a feather duster.

  “Before your sergeant comes, would you mind looking around?” I asked. “I’d feel a lot safer knowing no one else is here.”

  Hat in hand, he followed me into the dining room where Augusta stood with the light of the window behind her.

  Deputy Weber took a couple of steps into the room, then stopped and inhaled deeply. “Ahh . . . somebody’s been making strawberry jam . . . but isn’t that out of season?”

  “Room deodorizer,” I explained. Augusta, sparkling beads swinging, did a little dance step as she quickly hid the duster behind her.

  “I don’t see how anyone could be hiding down here,” the policeman said after completing his circuit of the first floor. “Why don’t you wait while I take a look upstairs?”

  Augusta had decided the brass candlesticks on the hall console needed a vigorous rubbing. Her sunshiny locks, I noticed, were now confined in a flower-dotted kerchief. “Seems competent,” she said, buffing briskly, “but I doubt he’ll find anyone here.”

  “He didn’t see you.” I sat on the bottom step and stared at her. She looked solid enough to me in her buttercup-yellow blouse and daisy-sprinkled headgear.

  “Did you really think he would? Isn’t that why you wanted him to look around?”

  “What did you expect?” I shrugged. “I had to know. Do you blame me?”

  Augusta moved to the grandfather clock that hadn’t run in twenty years. “I’m not in the business of blame.” She opened the door of the clock and touched something inside. It whirred and struck eleven times. The correct hour. Naturally.

  I looked up as the deputy started downstairs. “Everything seems okay up there,” he said. “I think I just heard Sergeant Sloan drive up; we’ll go out to the grave site and get some photographs, and then I want to have a look around your barn.”

  “What do you think you might find?”

  “That grave looks like it was excavated by hand. Maybe they left behind some digging implements, like a shovel with fresh prints on it.”

  I just hoped they hadn’t left behind Uncle Faris.

  Even with Augusta there, it
was quiet in the house after the two men left for the cemetery. Augusta wandered quietly from room to room, absorbing my history, I suppose, so she would be better equipped to do whatever it was she was supposed to do. And I hoped she would hurry and think of something because I didn’t know where to begin. Smokerise, the home that had nurtured me, offered no comfort. I knew why my mother had left, but I couldn’t help but feel abandoned. Friends who had flocked to comfort me when Maggie died had dropped out of sight one by one as if they were uncomfortable in my presence, and it was partly my fault, I know, for not being very receptive to them. Even my annoying cousin Beatrice (only she pronounced it Be-trice), who lived nearer than I’d like, had left me alone. I suppose I should be thankful for small favors.

  The pendulum of the clock in the hall measured heavy minutes as I moved from the stiff-backed Victorian love seat in the living room to the mantel where my mother’s favorite figurines—a colonial couple—stood. The porcelain lady had a chipped elbow I had broken playing ball in the house. Sepia photographs from a long-ago family reunion hung on the wall near where Mom’s piano used to be. I missed my mother, missed her music, her voice, yet a part of me resented her. It wasn’t a part I was proud of. My mother had deserted me for Savannah and a gig playing piano in classy restaurants. To save her sanity, my reasonable self chided. Yet hadn’t I given up a chance to live happily ever after just to stay behind and soothe her grief?

  I picked up the porcelain gentleman. If I bashed his dainty arm against the wall, the two would be a matched pair. “Oh, the hell with it!” I set him down again.

  “Does that really help?” Augusta sat in the rocking chair with Noodles on her lap.

  I looked up and glared at her. “What?”

  “The use of . . . well, unnecessary language.”

  “You mean, hell? Damn right it does!” I dropped into the chintz-covered wingback chair and threw my legs over its rose-splashed arm.