A Peach of a Murder

by Livia J. Washburn

  Phyllis blinked in surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

  Lee nodded solemnly. “Mattie knew the day might come when she wouldn’t be able to make her own decisions. As you and I have discussed before, she has a mild case of Alzheimer’s, and it’s slowly progressing.”

  Phyllis had the sense that he was working his way around to something else. ‘This isn’t about the Alzheimer’s, is it?” “No, I’m afraid not. When Mattie was here about six weeks ago, I noticed some things that disturbed me about her behavior, and that’s why I had an MRI done on her.”

  Phyllis remembered that quite well. She had taken Mattie for the procedure back in early June.

  “I found something then,” Lee went on, “but I thought it would be best to get a second or even a third or fourth opinion, so I sent the films off to a geriatric specialist and an oncologist I know, as well as a neurosurgeon, for consultation. I’ve heard back from all of them now, and they all agree with my initial findings.”

  Phyllis wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him to spit it out, for God’s sake. Instead she forced herself to remain calm. “What were your findings, Doctor?”

  Lee took a deep breath and then said, “Mattie has a tumor in her brain. Given all the considerations-her age, the tumor’s location and state of advancement-surgery isn’t an option, and neither is radiation or chemotherapy.”

  Even though Phyllis had been expecting that answer or one similar to it, the news still hit her hard. “You’re saying there’s nothing you can do?”

  “I’m sorry” Dr. Lee said.

  Phyllis sat there stunned for a long moment. She looked down at her hands, listened to the silence in the office. It wasn’t often that you heard a death sentence pronounced on a good friend. Her mind went back to her own early days as a teacher. Even though they had taught at different schools, Mattie Harris had been a mentor of sorts to her. A lot of what she knew about teaching, about caring for the kids and putting their needs first, she had learned from Mattie.

  Finally, she swallowed hard and looked up again. “How long?”

  “Iwo or three weeks, maybe a month,” Dr. Lee said quietly. “For what it’s worth, there shouldn’t be a great deal of pain until near the end.”

  “And Mattie … Mattie has no idea about this?”

  Dr. Lee hesitated. “Actually, she does. I was rather upset when I realized what we might be dealing with, and I said too much. Mattie knows there’s a good chance she might not have much time left.”

  “She never said anything to me……

  “I’m not surprised.” Dr. Lee smiled. “She wouldn’t have wanted to worry you. You know Mattie, always putting other people first. Now that it’s certain, and we have a better idea of the time frame we’re looking at, I thought it might be easier if she heard the news from you.”

  Easier on whom, Phyllis wanted to ask, Mattie or you? Because it’s sure not going to be easy on me.

  Still, some things had to be done, no matter how hard they were. Phyllis nodded. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Thank you?”

  Some stubborn part of her prompted her to ask, “Are you sure there’s nothing that can be done?”

  “Well, when I talked to Mattie before, we discussed alternative treatments. There are various drugs that haven’t been approved by the FDA, and herbal and vitamin supplements, and the sort of off-the-wall things that some people swear can cure cancer even though there’s no medical or scientific evidence for their claims. As far as I’m concerned, though, those are all just false hopes, and usually very expensive ones, at that. Some of them are even dangerous and can make the situation worse. I explained all of that to her and warned her not to try anything without talking to me about it first.”

  “She should have told me what was going on.” Phyllis said, as much to herself as to Dr. Lee.

  He shook his head. “It wouldn’t have done any good. She said she wasn’t going to bother you with it right then because you were about to start getting ready for the peach festival and the cooking contest. She didn’t want to distract you from that.”

  Phyllis laughed hollowly. “As if any cooking contest could be more important to me than an old friend.” “That’s Mattie for you,” Dr. Lee said with a shrug.

  Yes, it certainly was, Phyllis thought. Mattie was the ultimate volunteer, the person who just wanted to do good for the community and everyone in it, even if that meant not making a fuss about her own impending death.

  “All right,” she said, clutching her purse tightly. She stood up. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll tell Mattie that your diagnosis has been confirmed.”

  Lee got to his feet as well. “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

  Phyllis smiled sadly. “It doesn’t seem like there’s anything anybody can do.”

  “All things have to come to an end. As doctors, we don’t like that, but it’s inevitable.”

  “Yes. And I don’t like it, either.”

  She left the office, still a little stunned by the news she had heard. She had known that Mattie’s health was failing, of course. Mattie was in the December of her years, as the old saying went. But Phyllis had expected that they still had more time together than a few weeks. It wasn’t that she was unacquainted with the death of someone close to her-she had endured the loss of her husband, after all-but to lose a good friend was a shock and always would be. The idea of a world without Mattie Hams in it just seemed so wrong somehow. Mattie had always been there, a part of Phyllis’s life.

  Death had a habit of snatching people away, and the old gentleman had been busier than usual this summer, it seemed to Phyllis. First Newt and then Donnie and then-almost Jani Garrett, although Jani had slipped out of that bony grip, at least for now. Somehow, through coincidence, she supposed, Phyllis had been close at hand for both of those deaths and the near miss. And now, she would soon have to face the loss of Mattie.…

  Those thoughts were running through her head as she drove, and suddenly it was all too much for her. She had to pull over into the parking lot of a convenience store and bring the Lincoln to a stop. Tears burned hotly in her eyes, and there was a pounding in her head so strong that she feared for a moment she was about to have a stroke. She gasped as all the events of the past weeks came together, all the things she had

  seen and heard and read. Like a flower blooming in her mind, the truth opened up to her. She grasped the steering wheel tightly and shook her head, but it didn’t do any good. The pounding didn’t go away. It was a drumbeat of mortality and inevitability, the marching cadence of death.

  And just as she had thought before, there was a mason for everything that had happened, an answer for all the questions. The lessons of history were true again, as they always were. Cause and effect, one following the other as ceaselessly as the tides, as eternal as the stars.

  The tears still rolled down her face, but the pounding in her head gradually slowed and faded away. She took a deep breath, then another and another and stopped only when she realized she was about to hyperventilate. With the back of her hand she wiped away the wet streaks on her face. When she felt that she was calm enough to handle the car safely again, she put the Lincoln in gear. She hadn’t ever turned off the motor.

  There was nothing left to do now but go home.

  Chapter 31

  Eve was there by the time Phyllis got back to the house. The four friends were together again, only now there were five because Sam was there, too. Even though he had only been living in the house for a relatively short time, Phyllis already felt like he was one of the group.

  “You’ve been busy as a bee lately, dear,” Eve said as Phyllis set the table. “It seems like you’re always running around somewhere and are never here.”

  Phyllis smiled. “That’s about to come to an end. I won’t have any more running around to do.”

  “No more detecting?” Eve asked. “No. No more detecting.”

  While they were eating, Carolyn talked about Phylli
s’s run-in with Sally Hughes. Phyllis would have just as soon kept the whole thing quiet, but Carolyn was more animated tonight than Phyllis had seen her in quite a while and wanted to talk. She supposed that was because-while Carolyn wasn’t in the clear yet-the specter of Donnie Boatwright’s murder wasn’t looming quite so menacingly over her as it had been.

  Sam took up the story from the point where he’d arrived. “Just as I pulled up, I saw this big of woman tryin’ to clout Phyllis over the head with her purse. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me at first. I didn’t figure such a thing could really be happening. But it sure was.”

  Eve laughed. “I wish I could have seen it.” She turned and gave Phyllis an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. I know it must have been terrifying at the time. But it really does sound like it might have been amusing to watch.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Phyllis said politely, keeping her real thoughts to herself.

  “I don’t mind tellin’ you, I was more than a little scared myself,” Sam went on. “That lady was really mad, and when I stopped her from goin’ after Phyllis, I was afraid she might turn on me.”

  Eve reached over and took hold of his hand. “And of course you’re too much of a gentleman to ever lay a hand on a lady.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. I just figured that if she got in a lucky punch, she’d deck me.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Carolyn put in. “Sally Hughes doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would murder anybody, especially not her own brother. And yet she got so mad she was basically out of control when she came after Phyllis. If she got mad enough at Donnie… well, who knows, what she might have done.”

  Phyllis said, “I’m sure the police will continue investigating both her and Charles.”

  “Yeah, but they’re lawyered up now,” Sam said. “It’ll be hard to get anything out of ‘em.”

  “Lawyered up,’ Eve repeated with a laugh. “Dear, you’ve been watching cop shows on TV again.”

  Sam just grinned and shrugged.

  Phyllis looked around the table and was glad to see that they seemed to be enjoying themselves, even if a little of it was at her expense. After the summer they’d had, they all needed a bit of lightheartedness.

  Unfortunately, things were going to get worse before they got better.

  Mattie was quiet during supper, not taking part in the gentle joshing that went on between Sam and Eve and, to a lesser extent, Carolyn. She didn’t eat much, either, Phyllis noted. Her appetite was fading these days. She had always been birdlike, but now she was thinner than ever.

  When the meal was over and Phyllis was clearing the table, she said, “Mattie, would you be willing to give me a hand with the dishes tonight?”

  “What?” Mattie seemed a little surprised by the question, as if she hadn’t been quite aware of what was going on around her.

  “I can help you,” Carolyn offered.

  “No, no, I’ll do it,” Mattie said, as Phyllis had known she would. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  Carolyn frowned. “Are you sure, Mattie? It wouldn’t be any trouble for me to.”

  “I said I was fine, didn’t I?” Mattie asked a little testily. “The day comes when I can’t wash or dry a few dishes, you can just send me to the rest home.”

  “Nobody’s going to do that,” Carolyn said.

  That was true, Phyllis thought. Mattie wouldn’t be going to a rest home.

  Carolyn went upstairs, while Sam and Eve drifted off into the living room, Eve holding on to Sam’s arm while she told him that she wanted him to explain to her some of the finer points of the baseball game that was on TV that night. Phyllis happened to know that Eve had played on several championship-winning softball teams when she was a girl, and she didn’t need anything about the game explained to her. Sam cast a sidelong glance in Phyllis’s direction as Eve led him out of the room, as if hoping that she would come to his rescue as he had to hers that afternoon, but Phyllis had to disappoint him. He would just have to defend himself from Eve. She had confidence in his ability to do so.

  Phyllis had something else she had to do.

  “I’ll wash, you dry,” she said to Mattie when the two of them were alone in the big kitchen.

  “All right. I thought you usually used the dishwasher though.”

  “Oh, sometimes I just like to do things the old-fashioned way,” Phyllis said as she got dishpans from under the sink and began filling one of them with hot, soapy water.

  “Lord, I know the feelin’,” Mattie said “Sometimes it seems like-so much has changed that I feel like old Rip Van Winkle, like I went to sleep for years and years and missed a lot of things” She took a dish towel off a hook and toyed with it in her gnarled hands. “Sometimes I even forget that the war’s not goin’ on anymore, or the Depression. I was just a little girl then, but I sure do remember it. The bread lines, and the way so many men didn’t have a job, and President Roosevelt and the way he’d come on the radio and talk…. We had an old Sylvania, the biggest, prettiest radio you ever did see, and I’d always listen to Little Orphan Annie on it, and the Great Gildersleeve, and, oh my, Fibber McGee and Molly, they were so funny. `Don’t you open that closet, McGee! Don’t you open…”

  Mattie’s voice trailed off and she looked down at the dish towel in her hands for a long moment without saying anything.

  “It’s all right, Mattie,” Phyllis said gently. “It’s all right to remember things.”

  “But it seems like that’s all I do lately. Seems like I’m always back there in the past somewhere I don’t mean to be. There’s lots of things I don’t want to remember. But I can’t seem to stop.”

  “You were all right while you were helping the kids at the high school, the ones in summer school you were tutoring.” “I could always teach,” Mattie said with conviction. “Kids listened to me. For some reason I was able to get through to ‘em. To tell you the truth, Phyllis, I usually felt better bein’ around the kids than I did around grown folks. A kid’ll be honest with you, at least most of the time. Some of ‘em have some meanness in ‘em, no doubt about that, but not any real evil. They won’t hurt you bad for no good reason like a grown person will. That’s why I hate worse’n anything to see a kid bein’ hurt. They didn’t do anything to have it cumin’.”

  “Like Darryl Bishop;’ Phyllis said, her voice quiet now, as if she and Mattie were the only ones in the house. The noise of the TV from the living room had faded so that she no longer heard it.

  Or maybe it was just that the beating of her heart was so loud it drowned out everything else except her voice, and Mattie’s.

  “Poor Darryl. Too little to fight back, and too proud to ask for help. I know how kids think.’ He probably believed it was his fault that Newt was beatin’ him. Figured if he could just be a good enough boy, the hittin’ would stop. But it didn’t. It just went on and on, until that little boy looked like a dog that’s been whaled on with a stick. If you lifted a hand or raised your voice or even looked at him wrong, he’d just cringe so that your heart went out to him. I tell you, Phyllis, there was more than one night I cried myself to sleep over what happened to Darryl Bishop.”

  “I’m sure you did. I know you were upset about that boy who killed himself, too.”

  Mattie’s hands knotted on the dish towel. “Billy Moser. He wasn’t little, like Darryl. No, he was a big, strappin’ boy. But he was hurt, too. Couldn’t stand what she did to him. That tramp. She had no right. She’s a teacher, for heaven’s sake. She shouldn’t have been leadin’ Billy and those other boys on. What was wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Phyllis answered honestly. “I guess she was … broken somehow, inside.”

  Mattie snorted contemptuously. “She just didn’t give a damn about anybody but herself. She had her fun, and if it hurt somebody else, that was just too bad. Why, Billy told me … he told me that she laughed at him when she told him it was over between them. Said he was old enough to know
<
br />   better and that what did he expect, she was going to marry him or something? She laughed at him. Wasn’t a week went by before he was dead. A kid doesn’t understand that just because something hurts now, it won’t always be that way. He thinks his pain’s the biggest thing in the world-so big he can’t ever get past it. But Billy could have. He could have gone on and had a good life, if it hadn’t been for her.”

  A sudden wave of weariness seemed to wash over Mattie. She pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sank down into it. She had been talking a lot, more than Phyllis had heard her say in a long time, and it had to be taking a toll on her, emotionally as well as physically.

  But it wasn’t over yet. No matter how badly Phyllis wanted it to be, it wasn’t over.

  Mattie looked up and said, “I thought we were going to wash dishes.”