What Are You Wearing to Die?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I turned left. The truck turned left. Clarinda turned left.

  One turn after another I wended my way out of town and back toward the federal highway, leading my parade. I tried to avoid deserted streets, not wanting him to speed around me and cut me off. At the same time, I tried to keep my head down below my headrest so he couldn’t shoot me from behind. In a few minutes, I was so hot and clammy I had to switch from heat to air-conditioning in the car.

  Half a mile beyond the city limits, there was one more turn to make. I turned left into a long drive at a blue sign:

  SHERIFF’S DETENTION CENTER.

  The truck went straight and roared away. Clarinda followed him.

  “You dummy!” I yelled after her. “Didn’t you see me turn?”

  What a quandary. Should I follow them to be sure Clarinda was safe, or should I alert the sheriff’s office?

  I turned around in my seat and grabbed my pocketbook from the back. “Not now,” I told Lulu, who was ready for the ride to be over.

  I jerked my cell phone from my purse and backed into the highway, startling an oncoming car. As I raced after Clarinda, I punched the auto-dial for the sheriff’s office. “Uncle Billy picked me up on Oglethorpe Street and followed me out of town, but when I pulled in your drive, he kept going, He should be about a mile farther than the detention center now, in a dusty green Ford pickup.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Following him. Clarinda is right behind him. She was following me and he got between us. I’m terrified for her.”

  “Get yourself down to Martha’s. We’ll take care of Uncle Billy and Clarinda.” When I didn’t reply, he said sternly, “That’s an order, Judge.”

  Reluctantly, I gave up the chase.

  Martha and the children were in the kitchen getting ready to eat peanut butter sandwiches and apple slices. She and Cricket were delighted to see me and Lulu. The girls were delighted to see me, but pulled their feet up in their chairs when Lulu hopped in behind me. Now that I understood their fear, maybe I could do something about it.

  I picked Lulu up in my arms and held her while she squirmed and protested. “Hush,” I told her. “I want you to meet some friends of mine. Be nice, now.”

  She subsided and peered at the girls, whose eyes were like small terrified moons.

  I went closer to them and squatted down so Lulu’s head was lower than theirs. “I want to tell you something about dogs. They are like people. You know that there are some bad people and some good people, right?”

  They hesitated, then nodded in unison.

  “That dog at your house was a very bad dog. I saw him. I know.”

  Again they nodded. “He ate people up,” Natalie said with an exaggerated shiver, enjoying the thought when the dog wasn’t around to demonstrate.

  “I think he would, if anybody got close enough. He nearly scared me to death, and I’m a grown-up. But not all dogs are that mean. Lulu, here, has lived with me since she was a tiny puppy, and there’s not a mean bone in her body. She jumps around a lot because she’s like Natalie. She has a lot of energy.”

  That got a flicker of a smile from Natalie.

  “And she walks funny because she lost one leg when she got shot trying to save Pop. See?” I showed them the stub. “She’s a very brave and loving dog. When she comes toward you, what she wants is to give you a dog kiss, like this.” I lifted Lulu up to my face and she obligingly gave me a lick. “That’s how she kisses people she likes.”

  “Cricket Dog does, too,” Cricket contributed, not to be outdone.

  “Do you hear Cricket Dog out in the dog pen?” I waited for the girls to nod. “He’s upset because Lulu, his mother, is in the house while he has to stay outside. Both of them bark a lot because they are beagles. Can you say ‘beagle’?” I waited for the girls to repeat it, then asked, “Who wants a kiss from Lulu?”

  They cringed back in their chairs.

  “I do,” Martha said. I carried Lulu over to give Martha’s cheek a lick.

  “Me! Me!” Cricket cried, clapping. Lulu complied.

  “I do,” Anna Emily said softly, putting out her cheek. I held Lulu close and Lulu licked her. Anna Emily giggled. “That tickles.” She put her cheek out for another kiss.

  Natalie still drew back.

  “If you don’t want a kiss, would you like to stroke her head?”

  She put out a tentative hand and I stuck Lulu under it. Gently she stroked the dog’s fur. “She’s real soft.”

  “I’m going to put Lulu down now and let her explore the house. She used to live here, so she has to make sure nobody has moved the corners.”

  That made them giggle. They giggled more when Lulu started on a sniffing tour of the kitchen, then headed for the den.

  “What you here for, Me-Mama?” Cricket asked. He knew as well as I did that I never came to his house in the middle of a workday.

  “Pop and I need a place to sleep for a night or two. Do you all have a vacant bed?”

  Martha answered. “Sure we do. Let me get these people fed. Then I’ll show you to your room.”

  Not until we were upstairs and could hear the children piping away downstairs did I explain why I had come.

  Her face went white. “He was actually in the truck beside you? With the dog?”

  “Big as life and twice as ugly—both of them. I frankly never believed he’d come to town, but there he was. I sure hope Buster catches him.”

  The phone rang. Martha went to her room to answer it.

  “It’s for you. Clarinda.”

  “Does she sound all right?” I was already hurrying to the phone.

  “I wanted you to know I’m okay.” Clarinda obviously relished having taken part in our chase. “I followed the truck another mile down the road, and he turned at the crossroads leading to I-20. I didn’t want to go that far, so I hung around the turn waiting to be sure he didn’t turn around and come back. Then I came on back to town. I wrote down his license number, though. What should I do with it?”

  “Call the sheriff and give it to him. Had his men caught up with you before the man turned?”

  “Nope. I passed a cruiser on my way back to town.”

  “Then when you call the sheriff, tell him where the man turned.”

  “I will. But you might consider going somewhere else. If that man learns where Ridd lives, what’s to keep him from coming down there to get you and the judge, and hurting Cricket and his parents as well? You only gonna be safe at Ridd’s until somebody mentions you got a son down that road.”

  She was absolutely right. I hung up, shaking all over. “Oh, Martha, he really is after us, and I may have led him straight down here. And Ridd isn’t even home. What are we going to do?”

  “Have some soup while we think about it.” Martha is invariably practical.

  24

  We locked all the doors, but I felt very vulnerable as we sat down to eat. When I picked up a cracker, Cricket asked, “Why are your hands shaking, Me-Mama?”

  Thank goodness for Natalie. Before I could reply, she had grabbed the conversation and run with it. “We were shaking a lot at our house, the night Uncle Billy didn’t come. And crying, too. We were real scared, weren’t we, Anna Emily?”

  Anna Emily obligingly nodded, but there was no way she could get a word in.

  “But Daddy angel protected us. Do you have a daddy angel?” That question was for me.

  “I don’t know, honey. What’s a daddy angel? Is that like a guardian angel?”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know a gar-jun angel. But our daddy died in the war and became a angel. Mama said so.”

  Anna Emily spoke softly. “Mama’s a angel now, too.”

  Natalie reached over and patted her arm. “So now we have a daddy angel and a mama angel. Don’t you have a daddy angel or a mama angel?” She was asking me again.

  “I guess I do.” I’d never thought of them like that, but I had felt their presence at important times in my life. Like on to
p of that refrigerator. The Bible calls the presence of those who have gone before us a “cloud of witnesses” or the “communion of the saints,” but mama angel was as good a name for it as any.

  “How did your daddy angel protect you?” Cricket asked Natalie.

  Anna Emily finally spoke first. “He sat on the patio and kept us safe.”

  Natalie slapped a hand over her sister’s mouth. “We weren’t supposed to tell.”

  “That was that night,” I comforted her. “He wouldn’t care now.” I was most interested in what she was saying. “How long did he stay?”

  “Until the doorbell rang and the men started shouting, ‘We’re the sheriff. Let us in, by the hair of your chinny chin chin.’” Natalie had deepened her voice and was clearly enjoying her role as storyteller.

  Anna Emily stayed focused on the main point. “Then he ran off to the woods.”

  “How did you know it was your daddy angel?” I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Interrogating children is frowned upon by a lot of people, including me.

  Natalie resumed her role as family spokesperson. “He came to the front door and rang the bell, but I said we couldn’t open the door for anybody except Uncle Billy. That’s what Mama said. And he asked if Mama was there, and I said no, but she’d be right back. That’s what she said to say if anybody came. He said he didn’t want to come inside, but to look out the window and see if I knew him. So I looked through the blinds, and he looked like Daddy!” Her thin face lit up with more animation than I’d ever seen on it. “He went to war and died, but Mama had his picture in a frame, and I kissed it every night. I guess she lost it when we moved. We lost lots of things then—our books, our toys…”

  She said that so matter-of-factly, it broke my heart. What kind of mother moved her husband’s antiques and failed to bring her children’s toys?

  “What else did he say?” I wanted to get back to the angel.

  “He didn’t like us being there by ourselves. He said he’d sit in his car and wait for Uncle Billy. And I said Uncle Billy would be real mad if he came and found somebody there. Uncle Billy doesn’t like people coming to our house. So Daddy angel said he’d take his car down the road and wait out back.”

  Martha was as interested as I was. “Did you see him out there?”

  “Yep. He knocked on the kitchen door when he came back and I saw him through the window in the door. He asked if we had a blanket he could use, that he’d go down to the woods and wait for me to put it on the back steps. So I got a quilt from the living room sofa and put it on the steps. Then I locked the door again and he came back and wrapped up in the quilt and he said we could go on to bed, he’d stay until Uncle Billy came, so we would be safe. When Uncle Billy got there, I was to knock on the window in the back door so he would know to leave.”

  Anna Emily found her voice again. “We got in Mama’s bed, so she could see us when she got home.”

  “I don’t have any angels.” Cricket’s tone was envious. He slid Martha a look.

  She tousled his hair. “I’m not going to heaven just to give you a mama angel, so don’t be getting any ideas.”

  I was getting ideas. Ideas about a father who had searched all over creation for his wife and daughter, found two daughters, and found them alone. A father who would not ask them to violate their mother’s orders about letting people in, but who would sit outside wrapped in one quilt on a frigid night to make sure they were safe.

  “Excuse me,” I said, pushing back my chair. “I need to make a phone call.”

  “I told you not to call me, I’d call you,” the sheriff said when I reached him.

  “I know, but this is important.” I told him what Natalie had said and my conclusions. “Ask Grady about it, okay? Tell him Natalie has been talking.”

  “I’ll ask him why didn’t he just tell us, if that’s the case?”

  “Would you have believed him? Without knowing a thing about him?”

  The sheriff’s brief hesitation was long enough for an answer.

  “I wouldn’t have,” I assured him. “I’d have written him off as either a pervert—a Peeping Tom or worse—or a liar trying to exploit two grieving little girls. In my book, the fact that he didn’t say a word that might expose those children to being interviewed about him points toward Natalie’s story being true. Just ask him, okay? And on another subject, did you find Uncle Billy yet?”

  “Not yet, but we found his license plate. He left it on a Toyota in a motel parking lot up near I-20. Clarinda called the number in—unless she got it wrong. We’re running the number through DMV as I speak.”

  “Clarinda wouldn’t get it wrong. I told her to call you.”

  “How did she know where you were? I told you not to tell anybody.”

  “I didn’t. She guessed. Anybody could guess. I have to leave. Not only am I not safe down here, but these children aren’t safe. I’m going to suggest that Martha take them to her mother’s for the night, and I’m coming back to work.”

  The sheriff swore so rarely that when he did, people were so astonished that they capitulated.

  I, however, had known him too long to bow down because of bad language. “Look, here’s my plan. I’ll hire an off-duty deputy to guard the store until you’ve caught the fellow, and I’ll send Evelyn and Gladys home. I won’t endanger them, but I can’t stay down here endangering children, either. Who knows? Maybe my being in the store will lure Uncle Billy into town and your off-duty deputy can capture him.”

  He swore again. Before I could fuss at him, somebody spoke in the background.

  He got back to me. “Got to go, Judge. They’ve checked with DMV and Clarinda did get the number right. They’ve also found the woman who owns the Toyota and gotten the tag number Billy’s probably using now. I need to get people looking for it. Stay right where you are until I get back to you. You hear me?”

  “I’m going to have Martha take the children to her mother’s and—”

  I was talking to an empty line.

  As I hung up, I realized something: The girls were foster kids. Martha’s mother lived in another county, and Martha couldn’t take them out of the county without permission. That could take time to get.

  I ran down a mental Rolodex.

  Maybe Selena and Maynard would take Martha and the kids for a couple of nights. The big Victorian where they lived had at least five bedrooms upstairs. Besides, the girls knew and liked them. They would be safe there until we got Uncle Billy behind bars.

  I sound a lot braver than I felt. The thought of meeting Billy face-to-face shivered my gizzard, and the thought of his dog…I was sure it would take a silver bullet to kill that beast, and I was fresh out. Besides, he could take me down before a bullet reached him.

  Resolutely I put away concerns for myself and concentrated on getting the kids safe.

  Selena had seen battered families at the hospital. A second after I’d explained that the Parker girls, Martha, and Cricket needed shelter because the girls’ uncle was on a tear and likely to endanger them all, she was saying, “I’ll go make beds right now. We’ve put a privacy fence around the backyard, too, so nobody can see in. The kids can play out there. I’ll have Maynard run by Wal-Mart and get a ball and some toys.”

  Bless her heart. As heavy as it was about not having children of her own, it still expanded to take in girls in danger. I also had my first kind thought for the superstore. It used to be hard to buy toys in Hopemore—even toys for Lulu.

  Lulu! I couldn’t take her back to the office with me. I would not put her in danger any more than I would the children, and if the big dog came, she’d die trying to save me.

  Selena couldn’t take her. “Maynard is allergic.”

  I stood there feeling sick to my stomach. “It doesn’t matter, honey. I have just realized that even if you could take Lulu, we would still be abandoning Cricket Dog and a pen of bird dogs to a potentially vicious man and a definitely vicious dog. Not to mention Cindy’s horse, Ridd’s new pig, and
Martha’s chickens. You couldn’t possibly take all of them.” The younger Yarbroughs had taken far more enthusiastically to animal culture than Joe Riddley and I ever had. “Forget the animals—that’s not your worry. If you’ll take Martha and the children, that will be enough.”

  “Couldn’t you at least put the dogs and the horse in Hubert’s barn for the time being? I’ll bet Cindy and Walker would move them for you. It’s her horse, isn’t it?”

  Hubert’s house had been converted into a shelter for battered or homeless women and their families, but the barn still stood empty.

  “A brilliant idea. Thanks. Martha and the children will be there as soon as they’re packed.” I didn’t bother to tell her that Cindy and Walker and their kids were on a skiing vacation in Colorado. I could move a pen of dogs and a horse. Hubert wasn’t likely to object, since he was out of town until Wednesday night.

  I called down at the nursery and asked to talk to Joe Riddley. “He’s right here. Just a second.”

  “You still down in our secret hideaway?” he asked.

  “Only for a few more minutes. I have decided it’s not as secret as we thought it might be. In fact, it could be dangerous for other people, too, including little people.”

  Why was I was talking in code? Nobody could hear me. “Martha and the kids are going to Selena’s, and I’m going to Myrtle’s for dinner. We ought to be safe enough there, and I’ve given Clarinda a few days off. You want to meet me?”

  “Yeah. It’ll be half an hour, though. I have something I have to do first.”

  “Me, too.” I didn’t see any reason to mention horses or dogs.

  Martha and I packed suitcases and hurried the children into her car. “We’re going to spend the night with Selena and Maynard,” she told the children. “She has a new backyard fence and some toys she wants you all to see.”

  Cricket was excited, but Natalie and Anna Emily were frightened. “Do we have to stay there?” they asked Martha. “Are you giving us away?”

  “No, I’m going to stay there, too,” Martha assured them. “This is a visit for all of us. Then we’ll come back down here. Okay?” She turned to me. “We’ll follow you out, Mac.”