To Helen Back: A River Road Mystery

by Susan McBride

  Helen smiled thinly. “They’re quite a pair, aren’t they? They nearly got away with murder. If Velma hadn’t spotted them together at the truck spot, we might never have known.”

  Biddle cleared his throat. “Um, ma’am—”

  “Yes?”

  “You know my crack about your having a Miss Marple complex? Well, um, I think I should—”

  “No need,” Helen said, waving off his apology. “I’m just grateful that Felicity’s not the one sitting in jail instead of those two.”

  Biddle coughed and busied himself with some papers on his desk.

  Helen waved the codicil in the air. “Do you imagine this will hold up in court, even against Wet ’n’ Woolly?”

  “I already had a talk with Stanley Horn,” Biddle said, leaning back and folding his hands atop his belly. “As long as the same number who witnessed the signing of the formal will witnessed the signing of the codicil, then it has a good chance of being upheld.”

  “Oh, heavens,” Helen breathed, and pressed the page between her hands. “I just thought of something.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Whatever will happen when Ida Bell gets wind of this? I’d hate to see what she does to the water park people when she finds she’s got a legal leg to stand on.”

  “God help them, Mrs. Evans.”

  Helen laughed, and Biddle shook his head.

  “God help ’em all.”

  Chapter 34

  The next day . . .

  “STOP THIS THING! Stop, I say!”

  Ida left Dotty’s side and abandoned the small band of her sign-toting comrades. Without a thought to her own safety, she ran directly in front of the bulldozer rolling through the knee-high grass.

  She dug in her boot heels and waved her arms above her head. “Halt this instant!” she shouted against the noisy groan of the engine. “Halt, I say!”

  Above the ’dozer’s loud grunts, she heard the horrified shrieks of her friends and closed her eyes, bracing herself for the worst as the huge machine came at her; its clawlike shovel lowered to the ground as it rumbled ever closer.

  Expecting to be lifted off her feet, Ida cracked open an eyelid a minute later, when she realized she hadn’t moved and the motor was not groaning but idling.

  She peered ahead and held her breath, realizing that only two feet stood between herself and the big yellow machine.

  The bulldozer operator jumped down from his perch and stomped up to her. “Move it or I’ll run you over!” he yelled, sticking his face into hers so that she felt his spittle hit her skin. “I’ve got a job to do, you old geezer, and you’re all that’s keeping me from doing it!”

  “Over my dead body!” she shouted, crossing her arms over her chest, unwilling to budge even a fraction.

  He shrugged, looking her up and down, as if comparing her to some sapling to be uprooted. “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “You can’t do this!”

  “Says who?”

  “Says the law,” she cried happily, shoving her hand into her pants pocket and withdrawing a crumpled piece of paper. It was a cease and desist order Sheriff Biddle had gotten from a county judge, thanks to the recently discovered codicil to Gerald Grone’s will. She shook it under his nose. “Now turn that contraption around posthaste!”

  The dozer operator snatched the paper from her, holding it up with filthy gloves. “Is this on the up and up?” he asked, but Ida had dealt with disbelievers before.

  “It most certainly is, and so am I,” she assured him with the shrillness of a drill sergeant. “So stand by and watch this old geezer in action.”

  She brushed past him and around the lowered shovel, clambering up and behind the ’dozer’s controls without a thought as to the danger. She’d never driven a machine quite like this but figured it wasn’t all that different from the combines and tractors she’d learned to drive once upon a time at her father’s Jerseyville farm. She fumbled with the gears, whooping when the engine went from idling to growling again.

  “Wait a minute, lady! Hey, get down from there!”

  But Ida had already pulled the gearshift into motion, sending the bulldozer slowly moving forward. The machine rumbled beneath her like a fire breathing dragon, and Ida felt more powerful than she’d ever felt in her life.

  She spotted Dotty staring up, wide-eyed, alongside the handful of others, and she puffed out her breast as exhilaration sped the blood through her veins.

  “Tally-ho!” she cried, steering the ’dozer toward the Wet ’n’ Woolly billboard, urging it ahead until the sign was knocked flat on the ground, crushed beneath the rubber-covered crawlers to mere smithereens.

  Only then did she stop the bulldozer’s rumbling and, throwing back her head, let out a joyful shout; while, high above her in the trees, all the birds began to sing.

  Read on for a sneak peek at the next

  River Road Mystery

  by Susan McBride

  MAD AS HELEN

  Available July 29th from Witness Impulse!

  An Excerpt from

  Mad as Helen

  Prologue

  THE MINUTE MATTIE Oldbridge unlocked the front door and stepped inside the house, she sensed something was wrong.

  She set her overnight bag on the foyer floor, looked around, wrinkled up her nose and sniffed.

  The scent of Pine Sol from a recent cleaning lingered, as did another smell, one that Mattie couldn’t pinpoint. Or was it only her imagination acting up, like the arthritis in her elbow?

  She’d been gone just one evening, after all, spending the night with her nephew’s family in St. Louis. Maybe she was getting dotty in her old age, she decided, so comfy in her own home that she didn’t enjoy being away even for a brief spell.

  Still, she felt wary as she walked through the house, pausing in the living room to let her spectacled gaze roam. The Steuben pieces her Harvey—God rest his soul—had given to her that last Christmas, hadn’t she left them on the shelf?

  And where were the sterling candlesticks they’d bought in Mexico? She could’ve sworn they’d been on the mantel when she left for the city yesterday at dusk.

  She toyed with her wedding band as she headed into the kitchen.

  Fingers trembling, she removed the ceramic top from a canister marked SUGAR. She peered inside but saw only a lone rubber band and a bit of dust.

  She swallowed, and her eyes widened behind her horned rims.

  “Oh, no, oh, no,” she murmured as she hurried from one room to the next, discovering objects she’d come to treasure missing from each. Frantically, she groped beneath the clothes that filled the upstairs hamper, pulling out her velvet-lined jewelry box. She opened it up.

  Empty.

  With a whimper, she put it aside.

  That strange sensation she’d felt upon entering the house was more than her mind playing tricks. Someone had been here during the time she’d been gone. Someone had been in this very room, had stood right where she was now.

  The idea of it chilled her from her dove-white head to her sensible shoes.

  Without another thought, Mattie got the heck out. Her heart slapping hard against her ribs, she ran the few blocks to Sheriff Biddle’s office. Finding him gone, she hurried across the street to the diner where all of River Bend knew he ate every other afternoon.

  The crowd of heads turned as she entered. A few friends called out greetings. But Mattie Oldbridge had eyes only for the sheriff. She didn’t notice as the room went quiet. She only saw as Biddle looked up, his lips puckered to greet a lifted soup spoon poised in midair.

  “Good God,” she croaked, “Good God, but I’ve been robbed!”

  “Robbed?” the crowd echoed.

  She nodded and burst into tears.

  Biddle dropped his spoon with a clatter, the noise loud against the sudden h
ush; although the silence was brief enough. Voices rose in a garbled rush. Chairs squeaked, plates rattled, as the diner came suddenly alive and Mattie was surrounded.

  “Move aside, please, move aside.”

  Parting the gawkers like Moses did the Red Sea, Biddle took Mattie’s arm, and she allowed herself to be led away from the pack, out of the diner, across the street and to his office, where he settled her into a chair in front of his desk.

  “You need some water, Mrs. Oldbridge?”

  “No,” she tried to say, but the word that emerged seemed little more than a squeak.

  “Would you like my handkerchief?”

  This, Mattie gratefully accepted, bumping up her glasses to dab at her eyes. She watched him through her tears as he perched on his desk, one leg dangling, revealing a bit of pale skin above a black sock.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” he said.

  Mattie nodded. “Someone was in my house.”

  Biddle cocked his head. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

  “Y-Yes,” she stammered, and her eyes filled with tears again. She made a knot of the kerchief with unsteady fingers. “My best things are gone. Someone took them.”

  Biddle came off his perch, hiked up his pants below an overlarge belly, and went around his desk to sit down. He pulled out a legal pad and then a pencil, wetting the tip of it with his tongue. “Go on.”

  “My candlesticks from Mexico are missing.” Mattie sniffled. “So are my Steuben pieces and a sterling cigarette case.”

  Biddle nodded as he wrote.

  “He even took the cash I kept in the kitchen.” She sighed absently. “I’ve always put aside a few bills for emergencies ever since Harvey passed.”

  “How much?” he asked.

  “Oh, several hundred,” she guessed.

  Biddle let out a low whistle.

  “My jewelry’s gone, too, Sheriff,” she went on, and he glanced up from the paper. “I had it stuffed way down in the bathroom hamper. How did they know?”

  Biddle shook his head as he wrote. “I thought I warned you ladies about hiding valuables in the hamper after the break-ins at Mavis White’s and Violet Farley’s.”

  Mattie shifted in her chair, clutching the kerchief in her lap. “Well, I’d been putting it there for the past fifteen years, and no one’s stolen so much as a hat pin till now.”

  “Any sign of forced entry?”

  Mattie closed her eyes to better recall, but eventually shook her head. “The door was locked,” she told him. “And I use those heavy-duty dead bolts you mentioned when you spoke at my bridge club.”

  Biddle’s chair squeaked as it released his weight. He stood and slapped on his hat. He had the door open before she’d gotten to her feet. “Let’s go, ma’am,” he told her. “I’d like to take a look for myself.”

  By the time Mattie’s favorite soap opera started at two o’clock, Biddle had walked the well-tended plot around the house half a dozen times, had dusted sills and knobs and mantel for fingerprints—leaving Mattie with a mess to clean up—only to scratch his head when he was done.

  “Who was it, Sheriff?” she asked before he got in his squad car. “Who took my best things? Who got in through the locks?”

  He paused on her porch, his square face grim. “I’d say it’s someone who knew what they were doing, ma’am.”

  To which Mattie let out a little sob.

  Chapter 1

  HELEN EVANS AWOKE with a start.

  Oh, my, she hadn’t actually fallen asleep, had she? The crossword from that morning’s Alton Telegraph still lay in her lap, its squares almost entirely filled with the purple ink she always used precisely for that purpose.

  Ah, she remembered now. She’d gotten stuck on a four-letter word for “sea birds.” She’d had the darned thing right there on the tip of her tongue—hang it all, it was in every other puzzle she did—when she’d put her glasses aside to rub at her eyes, laid back for the briefest of moments, and then must’ve dozed off.

  “Napping,” she clucked, “just like an old person.”

  Which, in fact, she was, according to the AARP and all those restaurants that gave her their senior citizens’ discounts without even checking her ID.

  Well, as they said, getting old was better than the alternative.

  Helen slipped her glasses back on and stared down with wrinkled brow at the crossword in her lap. “Erns,” she said aloud just as it came to her. “E-R-N-S,” she spelled, and filled in the gap she’d been studying before she’d taken her catnap. All right, so her mind might’ve slowed a bit over the years, but it was still all there.

  “If you rest, you rust,” as she’d heard someone say once, and Helen felt the same. She wasn’t about to let any part of her corrode like a metal lawn chair left out in the rain.

  Her puzzles and bridge games, the quilts she was forever cross-stitching, each kept her too busy to ponder if her bones were turning brittle or if her brain cells were retiring one by one.

  Quickly, she finished up the rest of the crossword, setting the folded newspaper aside with a satisfied sigh when she was done.

  She removed her specs and glanced up. Through the screens that fenced in her porch, she saw Amber in the grass across the street, chasing a bird or a bug, looking like exactly what he was: an oversized yellow tom.

  She smiled at the sight and thought of something her granddaughter Nancy had said to her the day before. “Good God, Gramma, but you spoil that cat of yours more than you did any one of us.”

  Helen chuckled, deciding the girl was probably right. But then, she had plenty of time to dote on Amber, what with Joe gone and her living by herself.

  Oh, my.

  Plenty of time.

  She held her watch near enough to read its face without putting her glasses back on. She grimaced at the placement of the hands. “Hurry up,” she prodded, “or you’ll be late.”

  She hopped off the wicker sofa, grabbing up her purse and hurrying out the door without bothering to lock up. She’d very nearly forgotten what day it was and fairly flew the several blocks to the beauty shop.

  Helen arrived at LaVyrle’s Cut ’n’ Curl for her appointment with but a minute to spare. LaVyrle Hunnecker, operator and proprietress, was big on punctuality. “Would you show up late for one of Bertha Beaner’s teas?” she’d heard LaVyrle chastise a tardy client, a dark brow lifted beneath her teased web of blond hair. “Or for one of the minister’s sermons?” She’d harrumph, and the red-cheeked late arrival would sigh in agreement. The ladies who patronized the place knew good and well how LaVyrle—a strong woman despite her slight stature—could make their half-hour appointment one of misery, dismissing the shampoo girl and using her own steady fingers to tug and pull and wring one’s head with a roughness that left the scalp tingling for a good forty-eight hours after. And Helen, no namby-pamby herself—she couldn’t afford to be at seventy-five and a grandmother of nine—didn’t savor the thought of one of LaVyrle’s vindictive washes today.

  She gave a self-conscious pat to her wiry gray hair as she pushed the door open and walked inside the place. The smell of hair spray and flower-scented shampoo assailed her as she gave the ponytailed receptionist-cum-shampoo girl a sheepish grin. She hurried past a row of occupied helmet hair dryers and slipped into a chair at the rear of the room, where LaVyrle worked her magic.

  “Good afternoon, everyone,” she said, and glanced at the mirrored reflection of LaVyrle as she gave a final blast of hair spray to the neatly coiffed head of the sheriff’s wife, Sarah Biddle.

  LaVyrle grunted and glanced at the watch on her wrist before muttering, “You know the routine, Mrs. E. Mary will wash up your hair in a sec. I’m done with Mrs. B here. Just have to ring her up at the desk.”

  “Well, don’t hurry on account of me.”

  LaVyrle brushed at the purple cape draped about Sarah
Biddle’s shoulders, unsnapping it and removing it in one quick motion. Then she disappeared from her station with a rat-a-tat-tat of high heels; a moment later Helen heard her giving instructions to Mary in a no-nonsense manner.

  “You look lovely, Sarah,” Helen said as the sheriff’s wife craned her neck this way and that to admire her hair in the mirror.

  “LaVyrle always does seem to know what suits a person best,” Sarah replied with a satisfied tone.

  “I think she must have a sixth sense about her customers,” Helen remarked, and set her purse beneath the drawer-lined countertop that held an assortment of brushes, combs, clips, and curlers, not to mention several bottles of mousse, spritz, and sprays.

  A hand grabbed at her then, plucking at her warm-up jacket, and she straightened to meet Sarah’s buck-toothed countenance.

  “We were just talking, LaVyrle and I, when you came in . . .”

  “Oh?” Helen dared to ask, “About what?”

  “Mattie Oldbridge, of course,” Sarah said in a rush, “and how she got robbed the other day while she was in St. Louis with her nephew.”

  Though Helen had indeed heard about the incident from Mattie herself, she feigned ignorance so as not to deprive Sarah of the fun of telling the story again.

  “Frankie—I mean, the sheriff—he thinks it might’ve been some kids from Green Valley. You know how they like to get drunk and raise a little hell on the weekends. Or it could’ve been that awful Charlie Bryan. That kid’s always up to his ears in trouble.”

  “You don’t say?”

  Sarah sucked in her breath. “It’s the third burglary in the last couple of months, can you believe? Anyway, Frank thinks they’re pawning the stuff they steal, using the money to buy drugs.”

  Helen sighed. “For goodness’ sake.”

  Sarah scratched at her long chin. “Frank thinks they must’ve climbed through an open window at Mattie’s because there was no sign of forced entry. In fact, he said the house was closed up as tight as a drum.” She paused, head cocked. “He figures the window lock must’ve accidentally jarred shut when they left.” She shrugged. “And they’re not taking big things, like TVs or computers, which is sort of strange. It’s like they know exactly what they want, get their hands on it, and leave the same way they came.”