Who Left That Body in the Rain?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  “I’ll tell the chief. Meanwhile, let me give you the worse news. Jimmy Bratson’s friend has an airtight alibi for Friday night. He was at a political fund-raising dinner in Miami, at the head table, until nearly eleven, and went out for drinks with the candidate and some other people until well after midnight. It all checks out. As far as Chief Muggins’s suspect list is concerned, Skell now occupies second place after Mr. Garcia—”

  “—and Mr. Garcia only gets first place because he’s Mexican,” I finished sourly.

  “You said that; I didn’t. But you don’t hear me contradicting you.”

  I hung up feeling awful. It took me nearly an hour to realize it wasn’t just because Skell looked like the only real suspect for killing his daddy. My throat was scratchy and beginning to feel like somebody was pouring boiling oil down it, real slow.

  At noon, Rosa Garcia came by my office upset and angry because I couldn’t “do something” to get her daddy out of jail. She and her mother were holding the restaurant together, she said, but barely. I told her I wished I could do something, but I really couldn’t.

  By the time she left, I felt dreadful. My head was fuzzy and my nose streaming. I finally admitted I was afflicted with more than failure and poor self-esteem, and headed home. I have never admired thoughtless people who stagger on with a cold, dispensing germs to everybody in range. Seems to me that the considerate thing to do when you get sick is admit you aren’t indispensable, endure the inconvenience of a day or two in bed with a book and your favorite music, and let your germs die a natural and isolated death.

  I told Clarinda to make up a bed in a spare room for Joe Riddley so he wouldn’t catch whatever I had; then I put on flannel jammies and turned on my electric blanket. In a few minutes she brought up a hot lemonade well laced with her secret ingredient—which is a lot like Tansy’s. I climbed into bed figuring the world could manage to revolve for a little while without my personal oversight. If it couldn’t, I didn’t care.

  I did call Gwen Ellen to tell her I was coming down with something and to suggest she gargle with Listerine, in case I’d shared a few germs. I also told her I was real sorry I couldn’t get by the funeral home the next evening, but whatever I had felt like it had come to stay awhile. I promised I’d be at the funeral—on the back pew. I had the perfect excuse to sit where I could watch everybody who showed up, to see if anybody looked guilty.

  Joe Riddley woke me up when he came home just before six, banging around in the closet taking off his work clothes and putting on some old khaki pants and a shirt he could putter around in. I’ve told him a hundred times I am less likely to wake up from the closet light than I am from the racket he makes without it, but he has never believed me.

  When he came out, I saw that he was walking like a man who was carrying not just the world but the whole universe on his shoulders. I roused myself enough to ask, “What’s the matter?” My mouth tasted like I’d been sucking on Joe’s perch, and I felt like I’d gained twenty pounds since noon, all of it in my head. My shoulder muscles flat-out refused to lift that load from the pillow, so I lay back and prepared to hear that we had black spot on our entire new delivery of roses down at the nursery or that mealybug had infested our entire stock of houseplants.

  “Nothing.” He dragged himself to the mirror and smoothed his hair.

  “You look mighty down in the mouth.”

  “Yeah, I reckon I am. It’s this infernal rain.”

  That got me up on one elbow. “Joe Riddley Yarbrough, you know rain never made you this downhearted. It’s Skye, isn’t it? You are mourning. Why don’t you admit it—to yourself and the rest of us? You are grieving like a rooster in quarantine.”

  He sat on his side of the bed with his back to me. “I’m grieving all right, but it’s not just that he’s dead. It’s—” He sighed. “I can’t tell you, Little Bit. He asked me not to. And I wouldn’t if I could. You wouldn’t like it.”

  “You don’t like it either, honey. Tell me.”

  His next sigh nearly carried him through the floor. “I told you, I can’t.” He hung his head and began shuffling one toe on the rug, which he knows good and well drives me crazy.

  I prodded him with my foot to get him to stop shuffling and start talking again. “It’s about that legacy, isn’t it—the life-insurance policy?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. It’s odd he didn’t leave it to Gwen Ellen instead of you.”

  “He left a letter with it. He wanted me to do him a favor.”

  This was like pulling teeth with tweezers. “What was the favor?”

  He stood and went to the window. Rain was still streaming down like it had heard Middle Georgia is a great place to retire.

  When my husband turned from the window, the room was so dim that all I could see was his outline. His face was a shadow and his voice a rasp of pain. “I’ve told you, I can’t say. Skye asked me not to. Now stop bugging me and get back to sleep. If you don’t start looking better soon, I’m going to take you down to the mortuary to see if they can pretty you up a little.” Satisfied he’d done what he could to comfort the sick, he clomped down the stairs.

  Friday passed in a fog. Clarinda trotted upstairs with soup and more hot lemonade, and I slept for hours. I didn’t really wake until Joe Riddley came upstairs to go to bed.

  “You go to the visitation?” I called drowsily.

  He came and stood in the doorway. “I went.” He tugged off his shirt and threw it in a ball on the chair.

  “Were there lots of people there?”

  “I wasn’t counting.” He pulled off his pants and added them to the chair. He’d never have gotten away with that if I’d been well enough to remind him that I unlock our clothes hamper each evening between eleven and twelve for his personal convenience. The old coot was being irritating on purpose, seeing if I was too sick to notice.

  I wasn’t too sick to notice, just too sick to care. “What does Marilee say about tomorrow’s weather?” I muttered.

  Taking that as a sign I was wide-awake, he turned on the overhead light. “Marilee didn’t do the weather. They had a new boy who didn’t look any older than Bethany. You could tell he was reading the monitor, and he got the slides all mixed up. I laughed so hard, my sides ache.”

  “What’d he say tomorrow will be like?”

  “Fair and sunny, but I doubt he knows a thing about it.”

  He surprised us. We woke up to sunshine.

  “Maybe they ought to give that kid the weather job,” I said as we ate breakfast. I wasn’t feeling good, just halfway human. “He’s better at it than Marilee.”

  Joe Riddley chewed his cereal and considered the matter. “He’s not as pretty.”

  Joe gave a ribald laugh from his perch above the sink.

  Not until we were getting into the car did Joe Riddley remember to ask, “You feelin’ any better?”

  My first thought was that Skye always remembered when Gwen Ellen was sick and sent a yellow rose each day until she was well. My next thought was to be grateful for what I had: a living husband.

  “I feel lousy. I don’t have any fever left, just the nose-running, eye-streaming, throat-scratching nasties.” I rubbed my face, willing my sinuses to stop aching. “I took a pill that will stop my runny nose, but do I look like Mrs. Bal loonhead, or just feel that way?”

  He peered from beneath his bush eyebrows. “Mrs. Bal loonhead with a red nose.”

  “I ought not even be going, but I shouldn’t infect anybody on the back pew. I don’t think the funeral will fill the sanctuary. Do you?”

  “If it does, you can go into the narthex and listen on the ushers’ speakers. Sorry you have to sit by yourself.” As a pallbearer, he would sit on the front row across the aisle from the family.

  “Cindy called to ask if they can sit with me. I told her about my cold, but she said Walker never gets sick and she’s been exposed to every germ in the universe at the kids’ school. She also said she dep
ends on me to show her what to do.” Cindy was raised Episcopalian. Walker had gone to our church every Sunday until he left for college, but since they’d gotten married, they spent Sunday mornings lazing around reading the paper and drinking coffee or playing a round of golf.

  That bothered Joe Riddley and me so much, I expected him to say something, but he just rolled down his window and took a deep breath. “Smell that air. It’s spring, almost. And you’d think somebody ordered this day just for Baby Sister, wouldn’t you? Not a cloud in the sky, fruit trees and dogwoods fixin’ to come out, and look—there’s a deer.” A white flag disappeared into the forest across from Hubert’s pond. Joe Riddley had probably forgotten the streaming, nippy weather we’d been having. Short-term memory loss has some advantages.

  Soaking up sunshine, we didn’t need to talk. I didn’t feel good enough to talk, anyway.

  It wasn’t quite nine-thirty when we got to the church. The music hadn’t started, but a gray steel casket was already up front, the top half open, the other covered with a blanket of yellow roses. I didn’t want to go down there, but Joe Riddley insisted. “Come on, Little Bit. Pay your respects.”

  “I’ve god this awful code,” I reminded him, making it sound even worse than it was.

  “You aren’t going to give Skye anything. Come on.”

  I trudged behind him down that interminable aisle and stood looking at the friendly, lovable face of one of my dearest friends. Tears stung my eyes and a sob ripped my poor sore throat. As Joe Riddley put his arm around me to escort me back to my distant pew, I saw Gwen Ellen, Laura, Skell, and Skye’s parents through a blur of tears. They were gathered in the little session room off the sanctuary, with the door half closed. I wanted to go tell Skell to sit in the balcony out of sight, but my legs didn’t have the strength. Besides, Chief Muggins couldn’t arrest Skell without first letting Mr. Garcia go—even if he was low-down enough to arrest somebody at his daddy’s funeral.

  I sank gratefully into my pew’s soft red cushion, and Joe Riddley went to sit by the aisle on the left front pew where the pallbearers would be. Our funeral director always lined pallbearers up alphabetically, so Joe Riddley always sat by the aisle. He looked handsome and distinguished in his black suit.

  I grabbed a wad of tissues and tucked my pocketbook under my pew out of the way; then I cried awhile. It must have been the medicine, because I’m not much of a crier in public. That morning, I cried for the good things Skye had been to all of us, and I cried for all the things he had not been for Skell and Laura. Finally I remembered a prayer we used back when we still had a preacher who believed in confessing your sins: Forgive us those things we have done which we ought not to have done and those things we’ve left undone which we ought to have done. I prayed that for Skye and me both, until I began to feel better.

  Chief Muggins made me feel worse again when he sauntered in and sprawled on the back pew across the aisle. He gave me a little nod, but otherwise ignored me. Because he was wearing a brown suit instead of his uniform, I figured at first he was sitting back there because he wasn’t comfortable in church but wanted to pay his respects to the dead. From the way he was looking around the congregation, though, I began to get real nervous about Skell coming out and sitting up front.

  The organist started playing a series of familiar old hymns. That music reached down inside me and dredged up sadness like a golden, aching cord. Knowing it was still partly the medicine and fearing I was about to get maudlin, I concentrated on watching people line up in the center aisle to look in the casket. A good many had sent flowers, even though the family had requested donations to Hands Up Together. Seeing that notice at the bottom of the program, I remembered how Skye and Joe Riddley were talking about the project on the very day Skye died. I’d have started sniffling again if Ben Bradshaw hadn’t walked by on my outside aisle right then, stiff as walnut. Such self-control was inspiring.

  He took a seat right on the edge of a pew not far from my own. I was astonished at how good Ben cleaned up when he made an effort. In a charcoal-gray suit and a white shirt, he looked real prosperous. He might as well give up trying to slick down those curls, though—several had already worked their way out of whatever spray or gel he was using to confine them.

  He didn’t go up front to pay his respects, and he didn’t slide across his pew to sit nearer a couple who were over by the center aisle. Instead, he propped his arms on the pew in front of him and lay down his head. He looked like he was praying, but he could have been resting or even crying. I was embarrassed to look too closely, because our denomination takes Jesus’s instruction to pray privately so much to heart, we’d almost rather somebody caught us naked than praying.

  Walker and Cindy also came down the side aisle, and they slid into the pew beside me. I thought he looked real handsome in a dark blue suit, but I’d never say that out loud. Walker looks so much like me, I’ve never known if he’s good-looking or if I’m prejudiced.

  Cindy, now, anybody would have voted her “exquisite” in that suit of fine black wool with a gray silk shell. A chunky necklace and earrings of jet, granite, and amber saved her from looking like the chief mourner, but just sitting beside her made my navy suit and white blouse—which had looked both respectable and smart in my dresser mirror—curl at the hem and retire from the best-dressed list. Even Cindy’s shoes were gorgeous—sleek black pumps that probably cost about what I paid for my whole outfit. If we kept getting chummy, I might ask where she shopped and whether I could go with her sometime. My wardrobe could use some sprucing up.

  “You look awful,” Walker greeted me. “You want to go down front?”

  “I’ve been.”

  Cindy declined, as well, so he climbed over us both and strolled down the aisle. I wondered if he was remembering, as I was, how he used to process down it with the choir every Sunday. I was feeling real sad again until Cindy took my hand and gave it a squeeze. Then she held it. I was surprised how much comfort that gave me.

  I turned around at a rustle in the narthex, and saw the crowd parting for Marilee Muller. Marilee looked as chic as Cindy, but she wore a white silk suit. It seemed a little dressy for a funeral, but who was I to criticize somebody else’s clothes?

  I sure could describe her face, though. The word ravaged immediately came to mind. She didn’t look thin, she looked gaunt, with red eyes and a very pink nose. Yet she held her head high and her chin up as she marched down the aisle. Her hair had that fluffy look that proclaimed she’d just left the beauty parlor, and she wore such high heels that she stumbled as she walked. If Walker, on his way back, hadn’t caught her elbow, she might have fallen on her face.

  When she reached the casket, she stood looking down at Skye for such a long time that the woman behind her touched her elbow. People were backing up behind her.

  Marilee shrugged her off and bent forward. Was she touching him? I couldn’t see. When she turned away, she was trembling so hard she weaved her way back up the aisle. But she wasn’t crying. As she came back toward us, I saw that her eyes were stormy and she was pinching her lips together so hard, all you could see was a narrow rim of lipstick where her mouth was. I don’t think I’d ever seen anybody look that angry at a funeral.

  Marilee was heading for the back pew across from mine until she noticed Charlie. She stopped short and turned in a few rows ahead. She sank into the red cushion and froze. The only time she moved until the service started was to raise one knuckle to her lips and put it all the way into her mouth. Walker leaned across Cindy and nodded toward Marilee. “She used to do that in school when she got mad or upset,” he whispered. “Sometimes she’d bite herself so hard she’d bleed.”

  Having shared that tidbit about our local celebrity, he reached for a hymnbook and perused it while the organ continued to play. I watched wistfully, remembering what a good voice he had and how much our choir needed baritones. Not to mention how much Walker and Cindy needed God in their lives. I sure wished they’d get themselves and their child
ren into a church.

  Afraid he’d read all that in my face, I watched Marilee some more. She merited watching. What had Skye MacDonald done to make her stare at his casket with so much fury? They’d been friendly enough Friday afternoon. Seemed to me she’d been clutching his arm like she thought she had a claim to it, but in the restaurant later she’d been annoyed. Now, she leaned forward in her pew as if an invisible rubber band drew her toward that gray box up front, gnawing her knuckle. Would anybody get that mad about losing a good car deal? Maybe she was just being overly-dramatic. She was, after all, a television personality.

  Charlie Muggins watched her with slitted eyes. But he was also watching Ben. And me.

  My attention jumped to the front of the church when Gwen Ellen, Laura, and Skell came in with Skye’s parents and his brother, Jack, Jack’s wife, and their children. I held my breath, but Charlie Muggins didn’t move. Just watched Skell with the unblinking eyes of a lizard.

  Marilee continued to bite her knuckle while the family walked with dignity to the casket and grouped themselves around it. Like me, none of them wore black. Those who knew and loved Skye best had dressed not for the end of his life, but to celebrate his graduation from one stage to another. The men all wore dark suits. Skye’s mother wore a soft gray-blue dress with a large white collar. His sister-in-law had on a brown suit, and her little girl wore a pink dress. Gwen Ellen had chosen to wear a dark green jacket dress that was one of Skye’s favorites. Laura had on a suit of peacock blue that had to be new. With her new haircut, she was stunning. I noticed several people staring and turning to whisper to one another.

  One by one the women placed something in the casket. At the last minute, Gwen Ellen reached back in before she turned away. I saw her shove her hand in her jacket pocket as she took her place on the end of the family pew.

  I was real proud of her. She walked in quiet dignity, her eyes and mouth composed. She might scream and throw things in private, but she would not disgrace Skye now.