What Are You Wearing to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  Trevor lifted his head as if the weight of it was too much to bear, and stared at me without a word. The look in his eyes was one I’d seen in the eyes of a dog pleading with Joe Riddley to put it out of its misery.

  “I wanted to say again how sorry I am.” I stepped forward and offered my hand.

  He clutched it with his free one. “I appreciate it, Judge. I didn’t mean to get out of line in your office yesterday.”

  “You were grieving.”

  “Grieving a whole lot more today. Did you hear what somebody done to my baby?” His gaze strayed to her teenage picture and his lips trembled.

  “I heard.”

  “They had no cause to do that. And why’d they dress her up like that? Starr never wore that kind of stuff.”

  “Starr never had cause to steal that truck, neither.” Wylie was indignant. “I told her she could use mine. Keys were in it. All she had to do was drive it off.”

  “The sheriff will find whoever did it,” Farrell insisted. “Hang on to that.”

  Trevor was silent, but Wylie wasn’t comforted. “Putting them away won’t bring Starr back, or keep her from going through what she did.” He made a fist and slammed it down on the mantelpiece. “A trial is too good for whoever did that to Starr.”

  Farrell gestured toward a glass case that held a tiny fawn peering down at its reflection in a mirror pond. The deer looked alive enough to start nibbling the silk grass around its hooves. “You gonna enter this in competition, Trevor?” It was an obvious attempt to distract Wylie.

  Trevor didn’t respond.

  “Trevor!” Farrell said sharply. “I asked if you’re still going to the trade show and if you plan on entering Starr’s fawn.” He explained to those of us who didn’t know, “Starr found that baby dead in the woods last spring and brought it home for her daddy to fix up pretty.”

  “He finished it last week,” Wylie added. “She never even saw it.”

  “Wylie!” Farrell exclaimed in rebuke.

  It had taken that long for Trevor to register what Farrell had asked him. He shook his big head. “I probably won’t go to the show. Doesn’t much matter anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t cancel yet,” Farrell advised. “It’s not until February. You might change your mind.”

  One of the men whose name I didn’t know boasted to the others, “I’m hoping to get me a buck this fall that he can enter.”

  Not to be outdone, Farrell said, “I’ve about persuaded Robin to put in her fox and rabbit. That girl is good, ain’t she, Trevor?”

  “Good at getting her own way,” Wylie muttered, but Farrell had the floor and no intention of yielding it.

  “She can stuff anything. I’m of a mind to take her my wife and ask her to stuff the old bag in a nagging position. That way she’d look real natural.”

  Everybody laughed until they remembered why we were there. They hushed at once, and gave Trevor quick, embarrassed looks.

  Trevor gave no sign of hearing. His head had sunk on his chest and he was staring at the rug again.

  “Wylie?” Farrell persisted. “Robin’s good, ain’t she?”

  “I guess.” Wylie was still working that hangnail. It would be bleeding soon if he didn’t leave it alone.

  “Did she ever do taxidermy before, or did you teach her everything she knows?” another man asked. Somebody else snickered. Wylie swung around with fire in his eye.

  Farrell made a shushing motion with his hand and spoke as if to a deaf or mentally impaired person. “Trevor, Vic wants to know if you all trained Robin or if she already knew something about taxidermy when she got here.”

  The words took a while to percolate to Trevor’s brain. He roused himself with a visible effort. “She was trained before she got here. That’s why I hired her.”

  “She’s got a natural talent for it,” Farrell told the rest of us. “That fox is one of the prettiest things you ever saw. Looks like he could come over and lick your fingers.”

  “Chew ’em off, more likely,” I contributed.

  Bradley stirred in his granddaddy’s arms at the sound of my voice. I bent to say softly, “Hey, Bradley? I brought you some spaghetti.”

  Trevor gave the boy a little shake. “You awake, boy?”

  Bradley opened drowsy blue eyes. I wondered if somebody had given him something to sedate him. Then he saw me and his eyes flew open. “Me-Mama!” He held out his arms and struggled to climb off his grandfather’s lap.

  I bent and gathered him into my own arms. He nearly choked me, he held on so tight.

  “That’s what my grandchildren call me. He learned it from Cricket,” I explained over his head to the puzzled men. I didn’t bother to add that children in foster care are quick to give foster parents and grandparents family titles, as if trying to establish that they have a right to be there. It always breaks my heart how fast a foster child will call a strange woman Mama.

  “You doing okay?” I murmured to Bradley.

  “Yes, ma’am.” His face was as pretty as his mama’s used to be, but that night both face and voice were colorless. “I’m a norphan. Did you know that? Norphans are boys who don’t have a mama or daddy, and my mama went to heaven without me.”

  “I know she did, honey, but she didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.” I cuddled him for a while, then put my lips close to his ear and whispered, “I brought you some spaghetti.”

  “I doesn’t want pasketti. I want my mama.”

  “I know, baby, and I wish I could have brought her to you. But maybe you’ll get hungry later.” I raised my voice a tad. “Why don’t you ask your granddaddy if he’ll let you come play with Cricket one afternoon next week?”

  His blue eyes shifted from my face to Trevor’s with a faint flicker of interest. “Can I, T-daddy?” He snuggled up to me, his breath as sweet and warm as milk.

  “We’ll see.” Trevor sounded wrung out and bone weary.

  “I’d better be going for now. I’ll see you later, Bradley.” I gave him a squeeze, then lowered him into his grandfather’s waiting arms. Trevor drew him close.

  “Thank you for coming, Judge,” he mustered the energy to say. “I appreciate all that Ridd and Martha did for Bradley here.”

  “They were glad to do it. He’s a great kid—aren’t you, Bradley?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a norphan.”

  With a clatter of feet, Robin’s older daughter came running in. “Bradley? Bradley!” I got the impression she generally ran, yelling ahead to warn folks she was coming.

  Her younger sister sidled in behind her, giving the room a nervous glance. I figured she must be around three, and shy. The hair curling to her shoulders was the color of a penny, her eyes like chocolate. She took a thumb out of her mouth to say something softly to a man by the door.

  He looked startled. “Not tonight, honey.” He moved uneasily on his feet.

  The elder sister shrieked, “Bradley! Missy brought bubbles! Come on!” The air seemed to vibrate with her high little voice. She grabbed at him and danced in impatience beside Trevor’s chair. I am generally opposed to medicating children, but that one looked like she could use something to calm her down. I pitied Robin, having to deal with her all day.

  The younger sister put a gentle hand on Bradley’s. “Come blow bubbles wif us?”

  He looked up at this granddaddy uncertainly. “I like bubbles.”

  Trevor asked Robin’s older girl, “Will Missy be watching out for you all?”

  “Mama’s out there.” She pranced in her eagerness to be off.

  “Then go find the bubbles.” Trevor set Bradley down. The older girl tugged his hand, pulling him in her wake. The other sister trotted behind. I was glad I didn’t have the raising of them.

  Trevor’s eyes followed the children.

  I touched his shoulder. “I’ll be going now, but you know how sorry we are.”

  He put his hand over mine and pressed it. “Thank you for coming. Take care, now.”

  “You take care.” I sli
pped away. As soon as I was out of the room, I heard Wylie’s voice raised in anger again.

  Joe Riddley was munching a sandwich in the small living room while talking with Maynard and Selena Spence, Hubert’s son and daughter-in-law. Maynard had abandoned a rising career as an art historian in New York City to come home and take care of his daddy when Hubert had his heart attack. Afterwards, Maynard had stayed in town, revived our tiny Hopemore historical museum, bought and restored a lovely Victorian home, and eventually bought Gusta’s antebellum house and started an antique business that was building a nationwide reputation. He had married Selena, a newcomer who worked as a nurse with Martha, and they seemed settled in Hopemore for at least the rest of his daddy’s life.

  I was surprised to see them at Trevor’s, though. Maynard didn’t hunt or fish, and he was a good ten years older than Starr, so I couldn’t imagine how he knew the Knights.

  “You find Trevor in there?” Joe Riddley asked. When I nodded, he went to pay his respects.

  I turned to Selena and Maynard. “Where have you been keeping yourselves? Haven’t seen you all for at least a week.” Having helped to raise Maynard and gotten them out of a spot of trouble on their honeymoon,3 I loved them almost like my own.

  Maynard was his usual good-looking self, his blond ponytail confined by a black ribbon that matched a black shirt he wore with gray pants. I doubted that he had dressed for the occasion. Having lived in New York, he tended to wear arty clothes. Selena, like Robin’s younger daughter, had red curls, but hers looked dimmed that evening and her freckled face was pale beneath them. “I’ve been puny this week, so Maynard has been looking after me.”

  Without thinking, I glanced down at her stomach.

  “No, I am not pregnant. People have been asking me that all day. I had a stomach virus, that’s all.” She turned on her heel and marched toward the kitchen.

  I gave Maynard an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry. I guess we’re all waiting for an announcement from you two.” Since Maynard grew up eating cookies in my kitchen, I felt I could talk to him like a son.

  He colored up. “You may be waiting for a long time. We’re not having any luck in that department, and it’s got Selena on edge.”

  I changed the subject. We chatted until I saw Joe Riddley headed my way. “Please tell Selena how sorry I am,” I requested. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”

  Joe Riddley hooked me around the neck. “You got anybody else you want to upset, or are you ready to go?”

  The children were on the front walk, blowing bubbles under the supervision of a tall, sturdy woman with thick glasses and black hair that flowed over her shoulders in an unruly mane. She must be at least twenty, but had the unfinished look of a young teenager.

  Robin sat on the bottom step, watching them. As we passed her, I said, “I’m sorry about your truck.”

  She swiped back a tendril of loose hair behind her ear. “Me, too. I had a six-year loan on that thing, and the folks down in Dublin say I’ll have to pay it off, even though the truck was totaled. They say I owe five thousand dollars more than they’re allowing me on it. Can they really make me pay on a truck I no longer have?”

  “I’m afraid they can. Those six-year loans are nothing except one more way to lure folks into buying what they can’t afford.”

  Joe Riddley put a hand on my elbow to remind me not to get on a soapbox and preach at somebody who was already converted. “Go talk to Laura MacDonald over at MacDonald Motors,” he suggested to Robin. “She might have something on her used-car lot she can let you have at a reasonable price.”

  Robin sighed. “I sure hate to pay for something I’m not getting to use.”

  I felt a tug on my pants leg and looked down into the pleading face of her three-year-old. “I like you. Can I go home with you?”

  I gently detached her hand. “You don’t even know me, honey, and you’d miss your mama and your sister.”

  She flicked a glance toward her mother, then turned back to me. “Can I come play at your house for a little while?”

  “Not tonight. Maybe another time.”

  What made me say that? If I took one child, I’d have to invite them both, and I wasn’t sure our house could survive her hyperactive sister.

  Neither Joe Riddley nor I slept well that night. We tossed, turned, and lay awake discussing how dreadful it would be to lose a child or a grandchild and how much our hearts went out to Trevor. My pillow was wet and soggy by the time we’d finished. When I shifted my head over onto Joe Riddley’s, it was damp, too.

  I got up and fetched fresh ones from the guest room bed, then went to the kitchen and got myself a glass of cold water. As I climbed back between the sheets, I noticed the clock. “It’s five—hardly worth trying to sleep. We’ll have to get up in a couple of hours.”

  Joe Riddley was already snoring.

  I lay there with my thoughts going round and round. Why had Starr left her daddy’s house when they had been getting along so well? Was that before or after she went off the wagon? Why had she gone off the wagon, anyway, after so many years of staying clean? Where had she been going, dressed like that?

  Knowing that thoughts, like the sky, are apt to be darkest in the hour before dawn, I forced myself to stop thinking and belatedly kept my promise to the deputy. I prayed that Buster and his deputies would find whoever did that dreadful deed. I prayed for Trevor, and for Bradley. Remembering a police sergeant I’d once met who said she always prayed for the safety of her city when she was in charge of the homicide squad for the night—and that the city had never had a murder on her watch—I prayed for the safety of everybody in Hope County. And I prayed the prayer I often had—which had sometimes gotten me into trouble in my marriage: “If there’s something I ought to be doing, show me what it is.”

  Instead of a blinding revelation, all I could think of was Starr’s clothes. Why on earth had she been dressed so somberly when she died? Who might know?

  I couldn’t ask Trevor, but Evelyn might remember who Starr’s friends had been. I fell asleep in the middle of telling myself that Joe Riddley couldn’t accuse me of meddling if I was simply asking about the victim’s clothes.

  6

  The news about how Starr died spread like flies. Hopemore was terrified. By Saturday morning, foot traffic in town was nil. I heard from the few customers who came by that parents weren’t letting their children go to friends’ houses and were setting up parent patrols at soccer and football games. Young mothers gave up jogging or riding bikes with infants in three-wheeled rickshaws. Few women played golf or tennis that weekend. Deputies reported that law enforcement phone lines were clogged with calls from people who heard noises outside their homes or noticed somebody acting strange.

  As you might imagine, Joe Riddley kept a close eye on me. Autumn Saturdays are busy down at the nursery, with homeowners coming by for plants to put in over the weekend. Usually he works there while I pay bills and catch up on paperwork. That morning he stuck around the office reading seed catalogs with the same passion I bring to a good mystery. I was impatient for him to leave, so I could call Evelyn in to talk to her about Starr’s friends.

  Lulu dozed at my feet. Bo stalked along the top of the curtain rod, darting looks to see if I was watching. “You poop on that curtain, you are dead meat,” I warned.

  “I love you. I truly do,” he replied.

  I was fantasizing about an appropriate revenge for Joe Riddley’s Thursday prank when Hubert Spence came in, beaming like he had won the Georgia lottery. Behind him, Evelyn was clutching fistfuls of hair and shaking her head to signify “I tried to keep him from bothering you, but I couldn’t.”

  I motioned her back to work. Nobody can stop Hubert.

  He bounced into the office with his hand outstretched, and the way he pumped Joe Riddley’s, you’d have thought they hadn’t seen each other for years instead of at Rotary a few days before. “Hey, ole buddy. How ya doin’?” Without waiting for a reply, he turned to me. “And how you doin,
’ Judge? Is that a new outfit?”

  “Relatively.” I had treated myself to a celery green pantsuit at the end-of-summer sales. It was possible Hubert hadn’t seen it.

  “You’re looking good. Real good.”

  He looked pretty good himself. Not as handsome as Joe Riddley, of course, who inherited high cheekbones, straight dark hair, and an olive complexion with a tinge of red under the skin from his Cherokee grandmother. Still, Hubert was more than passably good-looking. Before Gusta had agreed to let him live in the same house with her, she had insisted that he bathe regularly, a habit he’d given up after his wife died. Once he got cleaned up, he started paying attention to what he wore and how he cut his hair. He had squired a congressman’s sister around the year before, and that past month I had heard a couple of widows talking like Hubert was worth a second look.

  “The world treatin’ you all right?” he asked me, still beaming.

  “World’s treating me fine.” I eyed him warily. I couldn’t think of a single reason for him to leave his store and come see us at work. Although we had been good neighbors for thirty-five years—Joe Riddley had harvested Hubert’s watermelons and fed his cows while he was laid up with his heart attack several years back, and Hubert and his son, Maynard, had been real helpful to me in the weeks after Joe Riddley got shot4—we had never been drop-in friends. The men had serious differences that were only partially due to the fact that Joe Riddley went to Georgia and Hubert to Georgia Tech. They had yet to agree on football, religion, or politics.

  Hubert started toward the wing chair, then aimed a suspicious look at the curtain rod, which was directly over the chair.

  “Back off! Give me space!” Bo taunted him.

  “Come,” Joe Riddley commanded, holding out his arm. Bo flew down to perch on it, then sidestepped up to Joe Riddley’s shoulder and sat bobbing his head, waiting to be entertained.