An early-morning shower had refreshed the air and Miss Dimple and Annie were shucking corn for dinner on Phoebe’s latticed back porch when Charlie joined them with the information Delia had found in her letters.
“It sounds like something you or I might have written,” Annie reminded her. “Remember what a crush we had our freshman year on that—”
“Oh, never mind him!” Charlie told her, recalling the good-looking history professor with a fascinating English accent they fantasized about until they learned he was old enough to be their grandfather. “Clay says Prentice was seeing somebody, and his is the only name we’ve found that might be of interest. Delia said she hadn’t thought anything about it when she first read the letter because it had become an ongoing joke between the two of them.”
Charlie smiled when she thought of what Prentice had written in the letter her sister had shown her: Guess who came to the game tonight??? Chenault Kirkland, and he was in his uniform, too! Oh, gosh! I thought I was going to melt! Anyway, he spoke to me—and I think he smiled—or maybe it was just gas.
“When they were in high school, Delia and Prentice used to concoct fantasies about Chenault Kirkland,” Charlie told the others. “You know … like you might about Clark Gable or Cary Grant. She paused, thinking again of the letter. Chenault is taking me to dinner in Atlanta tonight.… I told him I had to study, but the poor thing was so disappointed.… “He sent flowers, invited them on dates to exotic places. But of course he was out of their reach.… It was a joke.”
Miss Dimple stripped the shucks off the last ear of corn and added it to the growing pile. “Did she mention anyone else?”
Charlie shook her head. “Well … except for Clay, of course. It was Prentice’s last year in high school and activities kept her constantly busy. As you know, the school chorus presented two concerts a year, and most Sundays she sang in the choir. Then cheerleading took a lot of time until football season was over, and in April, Prentice had a leading role in the class play.”
I can’t believe this is actually happening to me, she’d written Delia. I never imagined how much I would love doing it!
“What did she have to say about Clay?” Annie asked.
Charlie shrugged. “The usual, for the most part—where they went for hamburgers, a movie they’d seen together—and sometimes they double-dated.” She paused. “It wasn’t until the last letter that she mentioned Clay’s objections to her going away to college, even though he knew she planned to stay in Elderberry and work for a year before leaving.” It’s true, isn’t it, that girls mature faster than boys? Clay Jarrett is a classic example! Prentice had written.
“I guess he thought she might forget about it after a year,” Annie said.
“If he could’ve read Prentice’s letter, he wouldn’t have been so surprised,” Charlie told them. “‘I can’t help but be excited when I think of all that lies ahead of me,’ she wrote. ‘Remember that poem Aunt Bertie taught us? I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.… I never thought much about it before, but now I think I know what it means.’”
A robin in a nearby apple tree scolded a squirrel on the ground beneath. The blades of a push mower click-clacked in the backyard next door as eleven-year-old Willie Elrod reluctantly cut the grass, but for a few minutes none of the three women could bring themselves to speak.
“I can’t help thinking of that scream you heard, Miss Dimple,” Charlie said finally. “If only we had—”
“If only’s will drag you down and bury you,” Miss Dimple reminded her, “so put that in a box and lock it away. As it was, I honestly don’t believe we could have reached her in time,” she added softly.
“I wonder why Mrs. Brumlow didn’t hear anything,” Annie said. “The train had already passed at the time she was buying gas and having her windshield cleaned, but she said she didn’t notice a thing out of the ordinary.”
“Probably because she wasn’t looking for it, and the sound came from another direction,” Dimple explained. “I heard it because we were on that hill on the other side and behind the Shed.…” She paused. “And it might also be because I have a few years experience in being receptive to cries of distress.”
Miss Dimple, realizing that all the grieving in the world would never bring back that wasted young life, gathered up her apron (purple, of course) and shook clinging corn silks onto a newspaper. “As you pointed out,” she reminded Charlie, “Delia was away for over a year after she married Ned, and when she came home after he was shipped out, she had little time for anyone but the baby. Prentice must have had other close friends during that time.”
Charlie nodded. “Delia said she was probably closest to Karen James. They were on the cheerleading squad together. And Iris Ellerby was her best friend in the chorus. As far as I know, they stayed close after high school.” She brightened. “You’re right, of course, Miss Dimple. If Prentice was seeing somebody other than Clay, she might have mentioned it to one of them.
“I think Iris just finished her freshman year at Wesleyan,” she continued, speaking of the girls college in nearby Macon, “and Karen took a secretarial course and went to work as a receptionist for my uncle Ed after Miss Mildred finally retired.”
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Mildred Stovall “hung up her hat” at age eighty-one after years of faithful service to Ed Willingham, one of the town’s two dentists. In the last few years, she had become so deaf that she mixed up names and dates for appointments, so patients only hoped they were showing up on the correct day and time, but genial Ed couldn’t bring himself to let her go.
It was agreed that Delia should be the one to speak to Prentice’s friends, as it would seem more natural, since she was nearer their age.
“I’ll suggest it to her today,” Charlie promised. “After all, I know she’s as eager to clear this up as we are.”
“And then what?” Annie frowned as she shoved the discarded corn shucks into a garbage can. Lately, it seemed, she became irritated and impatient at the least little thing. She knew her fiancé, Frazier Duncan, was somewhere in the thick of the fighting going on after the Normandy invasion in June, and it had been some time since she’d heard from him.
“I can’t help thinking this all started when Leola Parker died,” Miss Dimple said. “Perhaps we should begin there.”
“If you all want that corn for dinner, you’d better get it in here,” a voice announced behind them. “Water’s about come to a boil.”
Phoebe Chadwick’s longtime cook, Odessa Kirby, waved a wooden spoon at them from the kitchen doorway, from which came the aroma of green beans fresh from the victory garden, simmered long and slow with a chunk of streak o’ lean. “Corn bread’s hot, and Miss Velma’s done got the table set in the dining room,” she added.
Charlie’s stomach rumbled. Although she didn’t usually eat at Phoebe’s during the summer months, today she had been invited to take Lily Moss’s place, and had accepted gladly, hoping that lady would extend her visit in Atlanta. “Odessa,” she began as they filed through the kitchen, “I know you and Leola were cousins, but did you know her very well?”
Odessa, busily scrubbing corn at the sink, answered over her shoulder. “Course I knowed her, but she lived way out at the end of nowhere and went to that Zion church over on Blossom Street, so we didn’t see each other a whole lot.” Odessa shook her head, and from the expression on her face, you could tell she didn’t think much of her cousin’s choice of churches.
Charlie smiled to herself. Odessa’s idea of the “end of nowhere” was only a couple of miles from town and in easy biking distance from Bertie’s neat brick bungalow, and through seventh grade, Prentice had been dropped off there afternoons after school until her aunt got home from work.
“Why, I was ten years old before I found out Leola wasn’t my grandmama,” Prentice had once confided to Delia. The afternoon Leola died, Prentice had bicycled the familiar route across fields and woods and through neighboring land the mile
or so to Leola’s to pick blackberries. Leola had promised to make them into a pie, and it was close to dusk when Prentice finally filled her pail from the bushes bordering the back pasture. Rounding the corner of the house, where she’d left her bike, Prentice found the old woman’s body at the foot of the two cement steps leading to her small front porch.
“What a horrible thing for that poor girl to have to deal with!” Phoebe said when Charlie reminded them about it at dinner. Although they ate their main meal in the middle of the day, most people referred to it as “dinner.”
Velma Anderson agreed. “It’s tragic enough to come upon a stranger like that, but to find someone you love…” She shook her head. “I just can’t imagine.”
Miss Dimple helped herself to the homegrown tomatoes. “You taught Prentice, didn’t you, Velma? Did you ever hear her speak of seeing someone other than Clay Jarrett?”
“I only had her for typing her junior year,” Velma said, “and as far as I know, Clay was her one and only.” Slowly, she stirred saccharin into her iced tea. Sugar had been rationed since the beginning of the war, and although most objected to the aftertaste of the substitute, they rarely complained. After all, what good would it do? “Prentice was a good student,” she continued. “Well behaved, and so lovely. She had a leading role in her senior play, you know, and I believe she had some talent. Seth Reardon seemed to think so, too. I know he encouraged her.”
“Ah,” Miss Dimple said, and made a mental note to return to that subject later. However, first things first, she thought, and as soon as dinner was over and everyone was seated in Phoebe’s comfortable parlor, where an electric fan whirred without much effect, she returned to the subject of Leola Parker’s death.
“Do they know exactly how Leola died?” she asked Charlie.
“The coroner said her heart gave out when she apparently slipped and hit her head on the bottom step,” Charlie said. “There was a gash on the back of her head.”
She stood and went to the window, as if the sight of the pink climbing rose on the trellis by the porch would somehow lessen the grim reality of Leola Parker’s death.
“Delia said Prentice told her Leola’s hands were still warm, but she couldn’t find a pulse, and her frantic attempts to revive her failed. That was when she saw the smoke.”
“What smoke?” Annie asked.
“It came from the underbrush on the other side of that little stream that crosses Leola’s property,” Charlie said, “and Prentice said it began as a wispy little curl and quickly spread into a billowing curtain of gray. She didn’t want to leave Leola, but what else could she do? Prentice ran inside and called an ambulance and the fire department, but she said it seemed to take them forever to come. Meanwhile, she sat out there and held Leola’s head in her lap while the fire spread along the dry grass until a section of the bank next to the road was smoking black.”
Phoebe shook her head. “Poor child. She must’ve felt so alone. You know how far Leola’s house is from the road, and her driveway is almost lost in all those trees. Imagine having to wait there like that without a soul to call on for help.”
Restless, Charlie leaned on the back of the sofa. She simply couldn’t sit and do nothing. It was too late to help Prentice, but it galled her to think the person responsible for her death was running around free. “Actually, the ambulance got there in less than ten minutes, but it must’ve seemed like hours to Prentice,” she said.
“Leola probably saw or smelled the smoke and went outside to see what was going on,” Miss Dimple suggested.
“That’s what Sheriff Holland thinks,” Charlie said.
Velma nodded. “Some careless motorist must’ve thrown a cigarette into that dry grass, and that’s all it took, but I doubt if Leola’s place would’ve been in danger with that creek between her house and the road.”
It was true, Charlie told them, that the fire had burned itself out by the time it reached the shallow brown water.
But that hadn’t helped Leola Parker.
* * *
Dimple Kilpatrick experienced a brief surge of satisfaction as she walked past the Presbyterian church where Delia Varnadore played London Bridge with a number of five-year-olds in the grassy area in the building’s shade. Good. That should keep her safe for a while. She knew Delia was determined to find out who was responsible for Prentice’s death and had been questioning people on her own, but one young life lost was one too many. Prentice’s friend Karen James, Delia had reported, was surprised to hear Prentice could have been seeing someone other than Clay and seemed to have no idea who it might have been. Iris was spending part of the summer as a camp counselor in North Carolina, and her parents were withholding the news of Prentice’s tragic death until their daughter came home at the end of the session. “I wanted to write and tell her,” Delia had explained. “Maybe she would know who Prentice might have been seeing, but her mother asked me to wait. She didn’t want her to hear it like that.”
“I doubt if she would have access to a radio or newspapers at the camp,” Miss Dimple had said. “You can find out more when Iris gets home.”
“Her aunt Bertie says she has no idea who Prentice was seeing,” Delia added. “Frankly, I don’t think she believes it.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Miss Dimple told her, hoping the girl would take her advice. For Delia to try and investigate further could be dangerous, and she trusted she would keep that in mind.
Since Prentice’s death, some of the retired men in the community were taking time about helping Knox at the Peach Shed. Delia couldn’t bear to even look at the place, and Charlie, who loved peaches almost better than chocolate, confessed that she hadn’t been able to drive past since Prentice disappeared over a week before.
When she heard they were looking for helpers at Vacation Bible School at the Presbyterian church, Miss Dimple had offered Delia’s name. Charlie and her mother said they would be glad to take care of little Tommy, and all agreed it would be good for Delia to keep her mind and body occupied with something positive. It would also, Dimple hoped, prevent Delia from asking questions of the wrong people, and give her the time she needed to look into things on her own.
Miss Dimple prided herself on being an unerring judge of character, and felt strongly that Clay Jarrett wasn’t capable of murder. She had promised his parents she would help clear their son’s name by finding the true killer, and now she would start at the beginning. With Leola Parker.
CHAPTER TEN
“I’m so glad you dropped by,” Chloe Jarrett said, pouring coffee for both of them. “Thank goodness the police decided to release Clay, but I feel like we’re walking a tightrope, waiting to see if he’ll be arrested.”
Miss Dimple had telephoned before stopping by on her early-morning walk, hoping to speak with Clay before he and his father left to work in the orchards, but the two had already gone, and Chloe sounded so distraught, she found herself facing Clay’s mother alone. And so they talked of Clay and Prentice and what had brought them to that sad summer morning.
“Clay told me Prentice was having a hard time dealing with Leola’s death,” Chloe told her. “She was with her when she died, or soon after—awful enough in itself—but Clay got the idea Prentice seemed afraid.”
Miss Dimple nodded. Delia had noticed it, too. “Does he think it might have something to do with the way Leola died? That she might have seen or heard something?”
“I don’t know. There was that fire right in front of her house. They think it started out near the roadside.”
Miss Dimple wasn’t so sure about that. “But it seems she would have said something, told someone,” she said.
“Maybe she wasn’t sure,” Chloe said. “Clay thinks she was afraid to say anything about it.”
But afraid of what?
Chloe rose and took a pan of cinnamon rolls from the stove. “I bake because I don’t know what else to do, and it helps me to keep busy,” she said, sliding the buns onto a plate. “Do have one
while they’re hot, and let me heat up your coffee,” she offered, setting the platter on the scarred oak table. Miss Dimple rarely indulged in sweets, especially between meals, and she had eaten one of her wholesome Victory Muffins along the way, but the enticing aroma of yeast bread overcame her. “Perhaps just this once…” she said, helping herself.
“You know, I wouldn’t put it past that Jasper Totherow to have set that fire,” Chloe said, taking a seat across from Dimple. “He’s been seen hanging around Leola’s property in the past and he’ll stick like a tick once he finds a place to burrow in.”
If Jasper had ever had a regular job or a permanent place to live, Miss Dimple didn’t know of it. He mowed lawns when the mood struck him, picked a little cotton in the fall, and sometimes helped Knox Jarrett harvest strawberries and then peaches, but dependability was not one of his attributes and he showed up only when it suited him.
“This summer, he ate more peaches than he picked,” Chloe continued, “and Knox finally ran him off.” She sighed. “We have about all we can put up with here with Hattie.”
Miss Dimple relished the last bite of her cinnamon roll and washed it down with coffee. “I noticed her at the funeral the other day,” she said.
Chloe nodded. “Not one to miss a funeral, our Hattie isn’t, or much of anything else, but you can’t believe a word she says. She and that Jasper—two of a kind when it comes to stretching the truth.”
Miss Dimple frowned. “But why would Jasper want to hurt Leola? What would he gain?”
“Oh, I doubt if he meant to,” Chloe said. “Jasper doesn’t have the foresight to plan too far ahead, but he might’ve caused it. Sets those piddling little fires all the time. That’s how he heats his beans, or whatever it is he eats. “Wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on Jasper,” she added, “and I’ve said as much to Sheriff Holland. He’s the kind that bears watching.”
Miss Dimple Picks a Peck of Trouble: A Mystery (Miss Dimple Mysteries) Page 8
