Miss Dimple Picks a Peck of Trouble: A Mystery (Miss Dimple Mysteries)

by Ballard, Mignon F.

  “Maybe you’d better tell us what you know,” Clay’s father said at last.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Son, if Prentice doesn’t turn up, you could be in big trouble, and don’t pretend you don’t know it. Seems you’ve done gone and stepped in a pile of shit. You think I can’t tell you’re holding something back?”

  Was his own dad accusing him of doing something to Prentice? Clay felt like he’d swallowed fire; he struggled to find his breath. “You don’t think I had anything to do with Prentice disappearing, do you? Dad, I thought you knew me better than that!”

  “I know you didn’t have anything to do with it, but the police don’t. I heard how Bobby Tinsley was questioning you this afternoon. Seems everybody knows the two of you broke up after some kind of quarrel, and now you’re the likely suspect. Son, if you’ve got the sense of a gnat—and I kinda believe you have—you’ll use anything you know to help yourself.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Clay muttered.

  “I mean what if something … well … bad has happened to Prentice? She’s been missing since this morning and I’m afraid it doesn’t look good. The longer they concentrate on you, the longer it’ll take to find out who’s really responsible. Is that what you want? Do you think she would?”

  Clay felt those treacherous tears welling up in him again. Damned if he knew what Prentice would want.

  “Well, do you?” his father demanded.

  Silently, Clay shook his head. But then everybody in town would know Prentice had been screwing around with somebody else.

  “Elberta, we came to offer our help.” Knox Jarrett spoke softly through the screen door. Bertie, on the other side, showed no signs of opening it.

  “I think you’ve done enough,” she said. Her eyes were red and swollen and her face splotched from crying. She didn’t even look like the same woman who had stood in front of Clay’s high school English class and lectured them on the evils of attempting to compare the word unique to any other word; the woman who’d served them cookies and hot chocolate when he brought Prentice home from a movie.

  It hurt him that she’d feel that way, but he knew she was hurting, too. Clay thought he might choke on the tears in his throat. “Miss Bertie, I wish I knew where Prentice was. If I did, I’d tell you, but I didn’t have anything to do with this. Please believe me! I love Prentice! You must know that by now.” And, oh damn! Those blasted tears again!

  How long were the three of them going to stand there staring silently at one another? Clay felt his father’s hand on his shoulder and knew it was a signal to leave. He hadn’t wanted to come here, but now he didn’t want to go, not with all this hurt and pain straining through the screen door from both sides.

  His father spoke again. “Elberta, I’ll do everything I can to help find Prentice. I promise you that.”

  The two of them had turned to go, when Clay heard the hook dangle free on the door and Bertie stood aside to let them in. She walked, Clay thought, as though her shoes pinched as she led them into the familiar living room with the radio on the small side table by the squat lumpy club chair and a sofa slipcovered in a rose-flowered print that Prentice always said reminded her of squashed peaches. Clay headed for the armchair, leaving the sofa to the other two, who sat as far apart as they could. A plate of cookies, probably brought by a friend, sat on the coffee table in front of them, but nobody took one, nor were they offered. Why was it that people brought food whenever something bad happened? When his grandma Gladys had died, he hadn’t been able to eat a thing.

  “Clay?” Bertie leaned forward. “I know you cared for Prentice. I don’t want to believe you would do anything to hurt her, but it’s been hours now, and we’ve heard nothing. I’m about to go crazy thinking about all the things that could be happening to her. I’m so afraid … I’m afraid I’ll never see her again.”

  Twisting a handkerchief into a rope, she looked at him with eyes that mirrored his own hurt. “If you can think of any reason for this to happen, or anyone who might have had something to do with this, please tell me now.”

  He knew his dad was waiting for him to tell what he knew, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell Prentice’s aunt what she’d told him—not all of it anyway. “She said she was seeing somebody else,” he admitted. “That’s why we broke up. Prentice was—is—going away to college and she wants to see other people.”

  “But who?” Bertie stood and towered over him. “Who, Clay? Didn’t she tell you who?”

  He shook his head. “I wish she had. I wish I’d asked, but to tell you the truth, right then I didn’t want to know.” If he did know, Clay thought, he would probably have killed him.

  * * *

  Rose petals. He’d heard them talking about rose petals, although they hadn’t meant for him to hear. In the hallway outside the room where he sat, people talked in low, mumbling voices, their words muffled, like they were standing in a coat-jammed closet where consonants burrowed into pockets, vowels disappeared through a crack in the door.

  When they came for him that morning, he’d been eating breakfast with his parents: eggs and grits and some of his mama’s buttermilk biscuits with sourwood honey. Now it seemed Clay Jarrett had been inside this room since he was born. Ages ago, a gruff man had talked to him, then Chief Tinsley again, not so gruff, but his anger was barely concealed. Both had asked questions about Prentice. Some of them, he couldn’t answer; some, he just flat out wouldn’t. For a long time, he’d been sitting alone, sagging forward in the cane-bottomed chair, or pacing the length of the room—seven steps if he didn’t take very large ones. The one window looked down on a mulberry tree that dropped dark, squishy berries onto the rusting tin roof of Red Campbell’s Shoe Repair next door.

  Something had happened to Prentice and nobody would tell him what it was. Whatever it was, it was obvious they thought he had something to do with it. And, oh, God, he didn’t want to know! But how could they think he could do anything to hurt Prentice? Okay, so he’d been madder than hell when she’d told him what she’d done, but even then he had no desire to hurt her. Not physically. But a cold, dark feeling had come over him and for the longest time he simply couldn’t function. Clay stood at the dirt-streaked window and watched a squirrel leap from one branch to another. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember how he’d made it through the last couple of weeks.

  He jumped at a touch on his shoulder and a tall graying man in a navy blue suit smiled slightly and stuck out his hand. He looked like he’d stepped right out of an advertisement for Parks Chambers, that store in Atlanta that sold menswear.

  “Clay? Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Curtis Tisdale. Your parents have asked me to represent you.”

  “Represent me for what?” Clay slung the man’s hand away from him. This guy wasn’t from around here. He’d never seen him before. “Look, will you please tell me what’s going on?”

  With one sweeping motion, the man drew two of the chairs at right angles to each other. “Sit down please, Clay. There are some things we need to talk about.” His voice seemed gentle, almost fatherly. “Can I get you anything? Something to drink?”

  Numbly, Clay shook his head. Still standing, he grasped the back of the chair. “It’s Prentice. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Son, I’m so sorry.…”

  Clay turned away, but there was nowhere to go. His plastic face was melting all the way down to his stomach and it hurt. He didn’t know this man, but when Curtis Tisdale offered an arm, Clay took it, and for the next few minutes he cried himself empty against the stranger’s chest.

  * * *

  “We should’ve let him enlist, or go away to college—something.” Chloe Jarrett said.

  “He didn’t want to go away.” Knox looked at her across the small, shaky table in the back of Lewellyn’s Drug Store, a block from the police station where Clay was being questioned. Coffee sloshed on the tabletop as he lifted the mug to his lips. “Clay belongs here. When his number comes up
in the draft, he’ll go, of course, but he knows where his future lies.”

  “But we didn’t give him a choice.”

  “Didn’t want a choice. Seemed satisfied to me. Spoiled is all. Never had to do without.”

  The words were meant for her, like it was all her fault. “What’s that supposed to mean? Clay works hard, always has. And if I remember correctly, you went to college, Knox. And just when did you have to do without?”

  A bell jingled as the front door opened, and Chloe glanced up in time to see Dimple Kilpatrick walking purposefully toward them. If it had been anyone else, she would have wanted to hide behind the lotion display, but Miss Dimple had a calmness about her that seemed to affect everyone around her. “I’m so glad I found you here,” she told them. “I know this is a most difficult time for all of you, and I want you to know I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  Knox jumped to his feet and offered a chair. He’d always admired Miss Dimple and was truly fond of her, even though a few years back she’d made him clean the blackboards after school for throwing spitballs at Thelma Sue Honeycutt. But she waved the chair aside. “Thank you, no. I can see you have things to discuss, but I’m afraid we’re facing some dreadful times ahead, and if you will, I’d like you to tell Clay I have great confidence in him.” Miss Dimple reached across the table and took Chloe’s hand. “We’ll all get through this together,” she said.

  The troubled couple watched as Miss Dimple selected several greeting cards, paid for them, and left. They didn’t know she was thinking of the time seven-year-old Clay confessed on his own to breaking one of the small windows in the back door of the school while playing softball too close to the building.

  “Please don’t tell my daddy!” he’d begged. “I’ll be in such big trouble! My aunt Maud gave me a whole dollar on my birthday, Miss Dimple. Will that be enough to pay for it?” It was, and Dimple Kilpatrick never said a word. She also didn’t tell the child if it had been more than a dollar, she would have taken care of it herself.

  Chloe took a deep breath. She felt as if at least part of the load had been lifted from her shoulders. She knew from working with Dimple Kilpatrick that she had a sharp mind and a shrewd intellect and also had been instrumental in helping the police with several cases in the past. What a relief to have her on their side!

  But what was keeping that lawyer? Chloe took a paper straw from the holder and wrapped it around her finger until it fell apart.

  “Don’t.” Knox covered her freckled hands with his calloused brown ones. “Chloe, surely you don’t believe for one minute that Clay had anything to do with this girl’s death.”

  “Prentice. Say her name, Knox. Prentice. She was a person, a part of our lives … only now she’s dead.” Chloe had seen Elberta Stackhouse sitting like a wax figure at the police station, and for the first time she hadn’t thought of her as competition for her husband’s affections, but as a woman with a grief so deep there was no balm to reach it. She had wanted to go to her, but Knox had steered her away, and Bertie’s hurt pulled at her until she thought she would drown in the awfulness of the thing.

  Did Bertie believe, as the police must, that their son had something to do with Prentice’s death? If so, she must hate him, just as Chloe would hate anyone who harmed one of her children. But surely the woman knew Clay better than that.

  It was getting late now and people who worked downtown hurried past on their way home. It was too hot to linger. Had they heard about Prentice? How many of them had already made up their minds that Clay was guilty?

  “Curtis Tisdale’s the best,” Knox was saying. “We’re lucky to get him.” He squeezed her hand. “They can’t hold him, Chloe. We’ll have Clay home tonight.”

  “I want to see him. Why won’t they let us see him?”

  “Right now, he needs Tisdale more than he needs us, I reckon. But it won’t be long now.” Her husband lowered his voice. “Sounds to me like that nut in Atlanta might’ve had something to do with this.”

  She looked up. “What nut?”

  “The one who’s been killing all those women. Surely you’ve read about it. Scatters rose petals over their bodies. They call him ‘the Rose Petal Killer.’”

  Chloe winced. She’d read about those murders in the newspaper but hadn’t paid much attention. With the war and all, there was so much violence, so much killing, why read about more? “I thought maybe they’d caught him by now,” she said. Chloe studied her husband’s face, the sun lines around his solemn brown eyes, his lips working to maintain composure.

  “They didn’t find—were there rose petals on Prentice?” Her words were slow, shattered, like the flowers themselves. She grew roses—a few of them—in that plot behind the old smokehouse. Clay had never paid much attention to them, probably didn’t even know they were there.

  Again, Knox gripped her fingers. “Overheard two of the men talking at the station. One of them sounded like that detective who questioned Clay. ‘Covered in petals,’ he said. Didn’t know I was listening.”

  Her husband leaned closer, beckoned her forward until she could feel his breath on her cheek, see the small scar where he’d nicked himself shaving. “Chloe, they found her—Prentice—out by the old mill. Said it was their necking place.”

  “Whose necking place?”

  “Theirs. Clay and Prentice’s. Hell, just about everybody in town has been there.”

  Chloe hadn’t. In her day, proper young ladies didn’t do things like that. “How do they know it was theirs?” The lemonade she’d drunk earlier pitched and spewed inside her. This baby boy she’d suckled, sung to, and, with great difficulty, potty-trained—she didn’t know him at all.

  “Guess he told them about it.” Knox almost smiled. “Chloe, where did you think they went after those games?”

  “Why, to get something to eat, I guess. I don’t know.” And I don’t want to know, she admitted to herself. All Chloe Jarrett knew was that she wanted her son back home again. She wanted things to be the way they’d been before. The thought of Prentice—pretty young Prentice—lying dead somewhere was like coming upon a washed-out bridge. You couldn’t get around it; you couldn’t get over it; you simply had to deal with it. Chloe made herself ask the next question. “Knox, do they know how she was killed?”

  He shook his head. “Maybe they do, but I sure don’t.” He stood and looked toward the doorway as Curtis Tisdale approached them, his face grim.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It wasn’t real. Delia looked at the wrinkles in her green linen lap, her hands twisting the Lilliputian hankie her mother had pressed upon her. And what good would that little thing do? Delia had stuffed one of her father’s large handkerchiefs into her purse in case she needed to cry. Charles Carr had died when Delia was eleven, but her mother still held on to small reminders, and until recently she had kept a tin of his pipe tobacco on top of her chest of drawers.

  But Delia hadn’t cried, and it didn’t look like she was going to. What was the matter with her? Her best friend was dead. Murdered. Kind, beautiful Prentice, who had never hurt a living soul, was gone forever from her life, from all their lives. And she had yet to shed a tear.

  Next to her, her mother stared straight ahead, her face all drawn and tight, her hand barely touching Delia’s arm, but touching it just the same. Delia was glad it was there. On her right, her sister, Charlie, sat with closed eyes, one hand shading her face. The sharp edges of her small white purse dug into Delia’s thigh, and now and then she got a whiff of Charlie’s Chantilly cologne, a gift from her fiancé, Will Sinclair, before he left to fly missions overseas. Like Annie’s brother, Joel, Will was involved in helping to run the Nazis out of France, and Charlie wrote him faithfully every night.

  It looked as if the entire community of Elderberry was wedged inside the small Presbyterian church, built to accommodate less than half that number. Delia felt a trickle of sweat ooze down her face and used her fancy handkerchief to blot her brow. Miss Ella Clyburn, whose small cottage she
had passed every day on her way to high school, sat in the pew across from her, a drooping white rose pinned to her navy blue dotted swiss dress, and Delia wanted to smile when she saw it.

  Clusters of tea roses grew on either side of the gate to Miss Ella’s house, and every day during blooming season, she wore a pastel blossom pinned to her sagging bosom. Delia and Prentice had once brazenly picked a couple of the roses and Miss Ella not only lectured them sternly but telephoned their homes to report the misdeed. If Prentice were here, they would giggle and nudge each other, share a secret little smirk.

  But Prentice wasn’t here. She was down front in that glossy brown box covered in a blanket of primroses, daisies, and Queen Anne’s lace as dainty and sunny as she was.

  Was. Not is. Was, as in gone, dead, the final exit, and there was no reason for it, no explanation.

  The pianist began to play familiar hymns, Prentice’s favorites. “Abide with Me,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” songs she used to sing in her clear, sweet soprano. Charlie wiped her eyes and their mother snuffled softly; others wept openly.

  Delia wanted to swallow, but she couldn’t because there was a rock in her throat. No, not a rock, a boulder, and her mouth was as dry as road dust.

  Awareness settled upon her, as loud in its stillness as a clap of thunder. Around her, people drew in their breath, exchanged stiff-necked glances. Fans fluttered into laps, hymnals slipped silently aside, and Delia sensed, more than heard, muted footsteps on the carpeted aisle behind them.

  An usher leaned over and whispered to Miss Ella across from them, and she shifted to permit Chloe Jarrett to slide in beside her. Knox was seated in a folding chair in the aisle next to his wife, leaving Clay standing all sallow and hollow-eyed at the end of the pew while hundreds of pairs of eyes tried to look somewhere else.

  Before the usher could return with another chair, Delia’s aunt, Lou Willingham, who sat on the end on the other side of Charlie, gave her niece a firm poke in the arm and whispered for her to move down.