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

by Ballard, Mignon F.

  Hattie slowed but didn’t answer. She knew that voice, knew the woman it belonged to. Hardin. That was her name. Hardin … Haynesworth … something. Couldn’t let go of her maiden name so she dragged it along behind her like so much baggage. Why, Hattie didn’t know. Granddaddy was poor as a church mouse, but at least she wasn’t a Yankee. And it was awfully hot. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk all the way home.

  Hattie opened the door and, bundling her skirts about her, slid in beside the driver, oblivious to the woman’s expression of distaste. “A ride would be mighty nice,” she told her.

  The woman had been drinking. You could smell it all over her—not that Hattie cared. She wasn’t above taking a toddy herself if anybody were to offer, but nobody ever did. From beneath her veil, Hattie slyly eyed the driver and saw her slip a mint into her mouth. All the mints in the candy store wouldn’t cover up that boozy breath, she thought, and a crooked little laugh angled out and strained through the limp black net.

  “Did you say something?” The woman stopped suddenly at an intersection and Hattie steadied herself against the dashboard.

  “Throat’s dry,” she croaked. She hadn’t meant to laugh, but it did her good to know the Haynesworth woman had problems just like everybody else. She’d seen her earlier at the funeral, all cool and fresh in her pale blue dress and pearls, and she was still as spotless as a freshly ironed sheet, but something was surely gnawing at her. Hattie couldn’t remember who she’d married, only that he had money.

  The woman steered with her left hand and held a handkerchief to her nose with her right, like she had a cold or something. Or maybe she was upset over the funeral. She wore an emerald dinner ring on her right hand and a diamond as big as a peach pit on the other. You’d think she’d at least have manners enough to offer a mint, Hattie thought, but it wouldn’t be polite to ask. What would Mammy say?

  “Saw you at the funeral,” Hattie said.

  “That’s right. I started to go to the cemetery, but there was such a crowd.” The small woman behind the wheel glanced at her. “I suppose you’ve had a lot of commotion around your place. You must be glad it’s all over.”

  “Who says it’s over?”

  Hardin frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “They’ll come back when they know,” Hattie said.

  “When they know what?” Hardin Haynesworth … whoever fluttered her hand kind of queenlike at somebody in a passing car as they turned into the road that led to the peach orchard and Hattie’s rusting metal home.

  “When they know what I found.” Hattie closed her eyes. She sure was tired and the seat was as comfortable as any rocking chair. She could stand to ride a little longer if asked.

  But the driver wasn’t asking. She turned into the expanse of red clay and weeds that served as an access to the trailer Hattie called home. At one time, there might’ve been a road leading into the scruffy underbrush and pines, but now tall grass brushed the underside of the car as its driver circled and stopped. “And what have you found?” she asked.

  “Never you mind.” Struggling with the door handle, Hattie stepped out onto coppery dust. The woman didn’t sound like a Yankee, or a Nazi, either, but Hattie wasn’t sure she could be trusted to share her secret. Especially after she’d had too much to drink. She touched the brim of her hat with lace-mitted hands and made a coy little curtsy before plodding through the knee-high weeds for home. “Much obliged for the ride,” she called over her shoulder.

  The brief ride had relaxed her and Hattie knew a fruit jar of cold tea waited in her little box of an ice chest, but she had a strange prickly feeling something was wrong. Like somebody was watching.

  Late-afternoon shadows melted into the thicket, but the sun still blew its scorching breath with a smothering kind of heat. Hattie turned and looked behind her, but the fancy black car was gone, leaving only a lingering halo of reddish dust. If only she weren’t so thirsty, she would turn back. Grady Clinkscales at the Gas ’n Eats would give her something cold to drink. Hadn’t he done it before? But now the trailer was in sight, and rusty and run-down as it was, it was home to Hattie. She pulled off her hat and veil and began working at the buttons on her skirt. How good it would feel to peel away all these clothes! And oh, lordy! She was about to wet her pants!

  But as soon as she pushed open the door, Hattie knew someone had been there before her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  What a strange old bird, and about as batty as they come! Batty Hattie. And mercy, what an awful smell! Hardin Haynesworth Kirkland twisted her face into a grimace and rolled down the window on the driver’s side. Hot air blasted her face and played havoc with her hair, but she couldn’t stand the odor any longer. The whole car reeked of sour sweat.

  At least her husband wouldn’t notice she’d been drinking. Somehow he always knew, even when she sprayed and gargled, sprinkled cologne on the upholstery. That was about all Griffin Kirkland noticed about her, unless she said or wore the wrong thing. He didn’t curse, or even yell. Griffin never said anything worse than “darn,” and she’d never heard him raise his voice. No, his strategy was aloofness, and his weapon, silence.

  Hardin was accustomed to her husband’s coldness, his criticism, but his terrible silences banished her into a state of isolation, made her feel less than human. Sometimes she wished he’d just haul off and hit her, which, of course, he never would. Griffin Kirkland knew she’d never stand for that. At the least little bruise or telltale handprint, she would take him for everything he was worth: his money, his estate, and, worst of all, his reputation.

  Her husband had an image to uphold as a respected member of the law firm of Kirkland, Kirkland & Smith. The Smith partner had been dead for years, as had the founding Kirkland, but Griffin fully expected his son, Griffin Chenault Kirkland III, to join him after the war. Like his daddy and his daddy before him, Griffin Kirkland served as a steward at the Elderberry Methodist church. His own great-granddaddy had been minister there when the small brick church was built back in 1888, and the old man’s unsmiling portrait hung in the vestibule, where he seemed to be looking over everyone’s shoulder. Griffin was going to look just like him someday, and the thought of it made Hardin want to become one of those brave people who fled to some exotic place and never came back.

  But Hardin wasn’t brave. And she knew she wasn’t even very bright. Her Haynesworth granddaddy had lost his money during the Depression and nobody had ever figured out how to get it back. Hardin’s father had died when she was fifteen, but her mother managed to send her to business school for a couple of years, where she learned to take dictation and type other people’s letters. She wasn’t even a very good secretary, but Hardin Haynesworth was beautiful; she had looks and she knew how to use them. She had used them to get Griffin Kirkland.

  And then there was Chenault, the one thing she’d done right. Her son, her saving grace. If it hadn’t been for Chenault, Hardin would have left her husband years ago, but if she had, Griffin Kirkland would have found some way to take him away from her. He knew how to do things like that. Well, he wouldn’t be able to do that now! Hardin smiled. Now that Chenault was stationed on the southwest edge of Atlanta with the U.S. Army Installation Management Command at nearby Fort McPherson, he could come and go as often as he liked. And wouldn’t her husband be surprised if he knew she had been setting aside a portion of her household allowance for years so that one day she and Chenault wouldn’t have to depend on him? She could stand anything now.

  It was almost six when Hardin turned into the boxwood-lined drive to Silverwood, the Kirkland family home on the outskirts of town. The dark, dignified Tudor always greeted her with reserve, and even after all these years, she felt like an intruder there. Thank goodness Griffin had a meeting tonight and wouldn’t be home for dinner. If Chenault dropped by, maybe they could have supper together, just the two of them. And a glass—or more—of wine. Hardin slipped another breath mint into her mouth before heading for the shower.

 
* * *

  “I need your help,” Clay Jarrett said. He stood on the Carrs’ front porch in the darkening twilight of a summer evening, as he had on earlier occasions: double dates with Ned and Prentice, Monopoly games that went on forever, watermelon cuttings and high school dances. Happy times. This wasn’t one of them.

  Reluctantly, Delia stepped out to join him, leaving Charlie inside but within hearing distance. “What do you expect me to do?” she said. “My best friend is dead. You’ve come to the wrong place if you want sympathy from me.”

  Clay spoke softly. “She was my best friend, too.”

  His face was like a raw wound, and Delia looked quickly away. She hadn’t expected to see such suffering there. “I don’t think Hell could be any worse than this,” Clay said.

  He was nineteen, a year younger than she was. Too young to hurt like this, Delia thought. And so was she. Something in his voice wrapped around her heart, warmed it like a blanket. “I miss her so much,” Delia said. And finally the tears came. She’d never thought what a relief it would be to cry.

  She heard her sister say her name. The screen door opened and then closed softly, and someone took her hand and squeezed it. Clay. She could tell he’d been crying, too. “It’s time to talk,” he said.

  Delia found the dainty hankie still tucked in her pocket and used it to blow her nose. “I don’t know anything you don’t know,” she said.

  “You might. She was seeing somebody, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, but I got the impression it was somebody from around here, somebody older, and they were doing more than holding hands.”

  Delia backed away. “I can’t believe you’d say that when Prentice isn’t here to defend herself! Who told you that?”

  “Prentice. Prentice told me.” Clay plucked a frond from the wisteria vine that shaded one end of the porch and leaned against the railing.

  “When? When did Prentice tell you this?”

  “When we broke up. You think I like telling you this?” Clay sighed. “I thought she might’ve said something. I got the idea Prentice told you just about everything.”

  “Not lately,” Delia said. “But I’ve been busy with the baby—and I’ve been trying to help more around the house, too, with Charlie teaching and Mama working at the munitions plant three days a week.” Suddenly, she needed to sit down. She had been to her best friend’s funeral, and now this. Delia sank into the nearest rocker. “And then since Leola died,” she continued, “Prentice had been crying a lot.”

  “About Leola?”

  “Yes, but it was more than that. She acted like she was worried about something … kind of nervous and on edge, but she wouldn’t talk about it.” Delia hugged the chair’s cushion to her chest. “I wish I’d made more of an issue of it. Maybe she would’ve told me what was wrong, but she always got upset when I asked. Do you think it might have something to do with this … person she was seeing?”

  “I honestly don’t know what to think,” Clay admitted. “I guess she had a right to get upset with me. I didn’t want her to go away to school next fall—acted like a jackass—but I would’ve been willing to see her on weekends or whenever I could. Prentice didn’t want any part of it, wanted a clean break. The way she acted, you would’ve thought I was a kid. And then she told me they’d been … well, you know … what they’d been doing.”

  Delia frowned. “What makes you think he was older?”

  He shrugged. “Just from the way she was acting, like all of a sudden I didn’t have sense enough to get in out of the rain. She wasn’t ready for a commitment, she said. There were things she wanted to do.” Clay looked out at the quiet street, where moths whirled around the streetlight. “Seemed to me she’d already done enough. Anyway, that’s when she gave me back my class ring. Damn! I’ve never been so mad at anybody in my life.” He turned and looked at Delia, looked at her for a long time. “But not mad enough to kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “And you don’t have any idea who she was seeing?”

  Clay shook his head. “I was sort of counting on you for that.”

  “What about her aunt Bertie? Maybe Prentice told her.”

  He shook his head. “She says not. And how would you ask her that anyway? ‘Miss Bertie, do you have any idea who your niece was making out with?’ Besides, I don’t think the two of them talked about things like that.”

  “Leola might know,” Delia said. But Leola was dead.

  “She never mentioned anybody? Somebody she admired, maybe wanted to date?” Clay grabbed the arms of her chair, leaned so close that Delia could see the sunburn peeling on his nose. “It might even have been in a joking way.… Try to think.”

  “I’ll talk to Miss Bertie,” Delia said. “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t be explicit. Maybe she’ll remember something.”

  “Does that mean you believe me?” he asked. “You’ll help?”

  Delia nodded. “I believe you, but if I ever find out you’re lying, you’ll wish you were the one they buried up on that hill today.”

  He closed his eyes, plopped back in his chair. “Good enough. I’ve told the police she was seeing somebody, but I can tell they don’t believe me. If only I had a name—or even an idea—it would help. Look, be careful who you talk to about this, Delia—especially the part about … well, you know … the sex.”

  After a day that seemed as if it would never end, night had finally crept upon them, gently veiling the porch in darkness, but it wasn’t dark enough to hide the flush on Clay’s face.

  “I will. I promise,” Delia said.

  “And you’ll let me know if you think of anything, anybody Prentice might’ve been seeing?”

  “I’ll let you know.” Delia could think of only one name, but it was too far-fetched to be true. She didn’t want it to be true.

  * * *

  “Clay says Prentice was seeing somebody else, somebody older,” Delia told her sister.

  Charlie already knew it because she’d been listening, but she pretended otherwise. “Does he have any idea who it might’ve been?”

  “Says he doesn’t know. But why would she do that, Charlie? It doesn’t make any sense. She and Clay have been a couple for ages.”

  Maybe that was why, Charlie thought, but this wasn’t the time to say so, especially since Delia had married her Ned soon after high school. “Do you think she wanted to make him jealous?” she suggested.

  “Why would she do that? Clay Jarrett hasn’t looked at anybody else since tenth grade.” Delia followed her sister into the kitchen and poured a glass of ice water from the green glass bottle. “I’ll ask around, see what I can find out. Surely somebody has an idea what was going on.”

  “Are you out of your mind? If Prentice was seeing somebody else, he could be the one who killed her!” Charlie didn’t realize she was shouting until Delia hushed her with a finger to her lips. “Keep it down.… You don’t want to wake Pooh, do you? And how else are we going to learn anything? Any other ideas?”

  “Just promise me you won’t do such a foolish thing, Delia. If this person killed once, he wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.”

  “But it might even be that Rose Petal Killer they’ve been writing about in the papers.” For the first time that day, Delia Varnadore smiled. “And aren’t you the one to talk, Charlie Carr? Seems to me you and Miss Dimple and Annie Garner attract murder like a magnet.”

  And we’re pretty darn good at solving it, too! Of course there had been a few close calls, but Charlie knew if anybody could get to the bottom of this, it would be Miss Dimple Kilpatrick. “Remember you have little Tommy to think of and a husband coming home to you when this war’s finally over,” she said. “We’ll look into this, I promise.”

  It didn’t surprise her that she could hardly wait.

  * * *

  Upstairs, Delia smiled at her small son, who was sleeping froglike on his stomach, one hand clutching a woolly toy dog his father had bought for
him before he was born. A quick bath had refreshed her and her bed waited, but as tired as she was, Delia knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep right away. The room held too many reminders of Prentice. A lopsided friendship plaque of plaster of Paris, made when Prentice was ten, hung on the wall over her desk; a pillow cross-stitched with what was supposed to look like an angel was propped in the window seat. Letters Prentice had written when Delia and Ned first married and were living on an army base in Texas were still somewhere in her desk drawer, where she’d put them when she came home a few months before Tommy was born. Prentice wrote weekly at first; then her correspondence dwindled as the demands of her senior year increased.

  Could Prentice have mentioned someone in her letters? The drawer stuck; it always stuck, but Delia gave a hard jerk and it squawked open. Thank goodness it hadn’t wakened the baby! The letters, addressed neatly in Prentice’s rounded handwriting, were written on blue paper. There were twelve of them.

  Delia tiptoed into the lighted hallway and, sitting in the armchair where on rainy days she’d always liked to read, she spread them on her lap, arranging them in order of the dates they were mailed, but the postmarks blurred. Prentice was really gone! She couldn’t help her now, but maybe Prentice herself had left behind a clue.

  She didn’t find a name until the sixth letter, dated October tenth.

  It was the name she had dreaded finding.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Miss Dimple said. “After all, who hasn’t experienced a schoolgirl crush?”

  Charlie never imagined Miss Dimple had, but then, she was constantly being surprised at her fellow teacher’s daring and ingenuity and was learning not to be astonished at anything Dimple Kilpatrick pulled out of her hat.