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

by Ballard, Mignon F.

  Loretta, who had been slowly rocking, suddenly stopped. “I think I’ve seen that card before,” she said. “It sounds familiar somehow.”

  “Has someone showed interest in the property here?” Dimple asked.

  “Heavens no!” Chloe gasped, although sometimes she wished they would. “I’m sure I would’ve heard about it if they had.”

  Then where? Miss Dimple rose to leave. “If you remember where you saw it, you will let me know, won’t you?” she said to Loretta.

  “Of course, but I can’t think of anybody here who has dealings with a company in Florida. Who in the world could it be?” Loretta stood, too. “Mama, I have to go now, but I’ll call you tomorrow. Miss Dimple, why don’t you let me give you a ride? Those quart jars are too heavy to carry.”

  And Dimple Kilpatrick thanked her and accepted.

  * * *

  Elberta Stackhouse nibbled at her scrambled eggs and cheese. Prentice had always enjoyed that supper, heaping spoonfuls of peach jam on toast or biscuits, but now Bertie cooked it only because it was easy and cheap. She didn’t even miss the bacon or sausage she used to serve before the war made such things precious. She glanced at the empty place beside her where Prentice usually sat and from where she’d filled her aunt in on what was going on in her young life.

  And now that life had ended. Bertie’s stomach lurched and she pushed her plate aside. Would life ever hold meaning for her again? Life without Prentice? Remembering the not-so-late depression, she scraped the eggs into the trash can but set the toast aside for later. She had been raised to believe it was a sin to waste food, but what could you do with cold scrambled eggs?

  And then Bertie stood in her kitchen doorway and tried not to think, but it didn’t do any good. It was after six o’clock, but the sun was still bright and a cardinal sang in the old pear tree by the window; a dog barked not too far away; a plane rumbled overhead, and once again she felt the dark, heavy surge of grief welling inside her. How long? How long? Bertie took a deep breath and let herself go limp. It was time.

  In Prentice’s room, her blue-flowered bedspread was pulled carelessly over the pillows, the way she had left it before leaving for her job at the Peach Shed. The book she had been reading, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, lay open, facedown, on the bedside table. Sitting on the side of the bed, Bertie picked it up and looked at the date in the back. It was way past a month overdue from the Elderberry Library, but kind Virginia had not sent a reminder. Prentice’s clothes still hung in the closet. Her hairbrush, threaded with long, fine, sunshiny strands, waited on the glass-topped vanity along with a jar of Pond’s cream with the top screwed on crooked; and several squares of bathroom tissue, blotted with the pink lipstick she’d loved covered the bottom of a wastebasket.

  Bertie gathered the tissues and the hairbrush and clutched them to her. She ran her fingers through the brush and rubbed the tissues against her cheek in an attempt to absorb the last essence of the fine and beautiful woman she had raised and who had been as much a part of her as if she had carried her in her womb. And then she cried. She cried for the woman Prentice might have been, the children she might have had, the bleak certainty of a life without her. She cried until her body ached from the exertion of it and she was left empty and dry.

  In another two weeks, school would begin, and more from habit than from anything else, Bertie had already begun planning for her classes. She had always enjoyed being around young people, and loved the challenge of inspiring them, but the thrill that usually came with the start of a new school year just wasn’t there, and she missed it.

  This wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair—not only to her students but to herself. Bertie went in the bathroom that connected Prentice’s room with hers and dashed cold water on her hot, puffy face. She stripped Prentice’s bed and bundled the sheets to take to the laundry, then carefully folded her clothing to donate to the Bundles for Britain drive sponsored by the Parent Teacher Association. Her niece’s hairbrush and personal items were tucked lovingly away in a small wooden box.

  Dusk had arrived by the time she finished packing everything away, and the room was soulless and bare as if it had been vacuumed of energy, of joy. Bertie poured herself a glass of tea and sat out on the porch. Across the road, neighbor children laughed and shrieked as they raced through a sprinkler on the lawn. Bertie smiled as she watched them. Life goes on, with or without you, Elberta Stackhouse. How are you going to spend it?

  And she took her empty glass inside and picked up the telephone.

  * * *

  Thank goodness Knox himself answered. If it had been Chloe, she would have had no choice but to tell her the truth. Chloe deserved that, but it would have made both of them uncomfortable, to say the least.

  Knox’s first thought was that she had found something or remembered something that might help in Clay’s defense, or, God forbid, something that would convict him, but she spoke with a calmness that defied that.

  “I need to speak with you, Knox,” Elberta told him. “Would it be convenient for you to drop by for a few minutes? It shouldn’t take long.”

  He frowned. “Well, of course, Bertie. I’ll do anything I can. I think you know that.”

  Knox didn’t tell Chloe where he was going, only that he had an errand and wouldn’t be long. He found Elberta waiting on her porch when he arrived there a few minutes later.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “About as well as half a person can be, but I’m thinking of changing that,” she said, offering him a seat in one of the wicker porch chairs. Elberta took the other one, facing him.

  Knox Jarrett looked at her for a long time and knew that she knew his suffering couldn’t begin to equal hers, although it came pretty damn close. “Bertie,” he began, “I’m so sorry—”

  She shook her head. “Knox, I know Clay wouldn’t have hurt Prentice. It had to have been somebody else who put her ring in his truck. One of these days, maybe they’ll find out who did this, but I wanted you—and Chloe, too—to know I don’t believe Clay had anything to do with it.”

  He didn’t even try to hide the tears that came—tears of relief, tears of regret, tears of compassion. “Bertie, I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Sorry for everything.”

  Sorry for everything. The words were heavy. They weighed a million pounds, and Elberta Stackhouse felt as if she had been lugging them around for over a quarter of a century. She stood and took his hand. “Thank you,” she said.

  * * *

  On the other side of town, Dimple Kilpatrick sat down to a supper of pimento cheese sandwiches and canned tomato soup. Phoebe’s cook, Odessa, had gone to a funeral that day. As one of the flower-bearers, she knew she would be too late to cook, but she had left a tray of homemade pineapple sherbet for dessert. After helping with the dishes, Dimple and Annie took their sherbet to the porch, where lightning bugs blinked in the twilight, and next door Willie Elrod and some of his friends played One-Two-Three Red Light Stop! attempting to soak up as much fun as possible in their dwindling summer.

  The other women stayed inside to listen to a program on the radio, so the two had the porch to themselves, and Miss Dimple took the opportunity to tell Annie about her visits with the Jarretts and Jasper Totherow. Annie had learned earlier of Mary Joy’s offer from the stranger and of Miss Dimple’s attempt to place a long-distance call to the company in Florida.

  “Clay’s sister Loretta seems to think the name of the company and the initials on the card sounded familiar,” Miss Dimple confided. “She was almost sure she’d seen them somewhere before.”

  “I can’t imagine where,” Annie said. She closed her eyes and let the creaking of the swing lull her. Maybe tonight she would be able to sleep. Every day now for longer than she wanted to count, she would tell herself, This might be the day I hear from Frazier! But it wasn’t. Day after day, it wasn’t. She knew Charlie had received several letters from Will all at once, because Jesse Dean Greeson had told Odessa about it when she’d stopped to buy a ba
g of rice at Harris Cooper’s store, and, of course Odessa, being happy for Charlie, had told everyone else.

  What kind of horrible person am I, Annie thought, to be jealous of my best friend’s good fortune? Of course she wanted Will to be safe, just as she wanted the same for her brother, Joel, and for Fain, for Delia’s Ned, and for Phoebe’s young Harrison, but she wanted it for her own Frazier, too! This awful waiting was wearing her down and wringing her out.

  Tomorrow, Annie thought, I will get up early and join Miss Dimple on her morning walk, watch the sun rise from the hills above town, and look ahead to a day when the war will be over.

  But by the time Annie awoke the next morning, Miss Dimple had already circled the town and was enjoying a poached egg on toast with a dab of strawberry preserves on the side, so Annie set off alone, determined to begin her day on the right course.

  Odessa was out sweeping the front walk when the boy on the black bicycle turned into their street and stopped right in front of the house.

  Odessa pretended she didn’t see him. If she didn’t see him, maybe he would go away, but when she looked up, he was still there.

  “We don’t want no dealings with you,” she told him as he bumped his bicycle over the curb. “You just go along now.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” the boy told her. “I have a telegram for Miss Annie Gardner. Somebody will have to sign.”

  Odessa’s eyes widened. Did he think she couldn’t sign her name? Why, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick had taught her how to read and write when she’d first come to work for Miss Phoebe. “Lemme have that pencil!” she said, and took the telegram from his hand. Then she turned and hurried inside, leaving the broom in the middle of the walkway along with her hopes for a bright new day.

  Lily Moss had finished her late breakfast of cornflakes and milk topped with fresh sliced peaches. “Who was that, Odessa?” she asked, and then she saw Odessa’s face and the yellow envelope in her hand.

  “Oh, dear God! Phoebe, come quick! Odessa Kirby, don’t you dare pass out on me!” Quickly, she snatched an armchair from the dining room—barely in time for Odessa to plop down on it—and began to fan her with the Elderberry telephone book, which happened to be the closest thing at hand.

  “Let me see that!” Phoebe rushed in from the kitchen, followed by Velma Anderson, who, with her graying hair tied up in a bandanna, was on her way to the high school to get her classroom ready for the beginning of the school year.

  “Oh no! This is for Annie.… It’s what she’s been worrying about.” Phoebe examined the telegram as if she could read it with X-ray vision. “Oh, that poor girl!

  Miss Dimple, who had gone upstairs to freshen herself, wasn’t aware of what was going on below until she started back down and saw the tableau. At the same time, Annie, having walked for what she assumed was an appropriate amount of time, sauntered into Phoebe’s walkway, picked up the broom, and encountered the lot of them staring at her in alarm.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. And then she saw the telegram and knew it was for her.

  Miss Dimple put the telegram in her hand and, leading her into the parlor, seated her in the soft plush chair by the window.

  Annie put her face in her hands. “I can’t read it,” she said. “Somebody, please! Won’t you read it for me?”

  Silence reigned. No one, it seemed, wanted to be the announcer of worse-than-bad news. Finally, Miss Dimple stepped up. “I’ll read it,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dimple Kilpatrick stood by the window, her hand on Annie’s shoulder, and willed herself to speak calmly. The other women hovered nearby in terrified silence as Miss Dimple adjusted her bifocals and read:

  SMALL PROBLEM BUT AM OK stop LETTER ON WAY stop

  LOVE, FRAZIER

  “Oh, glory hallelujah!” Odessa, who had been clutching the arms of her chair, sprang to her feet and threw her hands in the air.

  “Amen to that!” Annie said, laughing, as Miss Dimple gave her the telegram. Her hand trembled as she read it again. He was safe. Her Frazier was safe!

  “I wonder what he meant by a small problem,” Phoebe said.

  “I don’t know, but he’s alive! Thank goodness, he’s alive!” Annie jumped up and hugged them all. “I have to telephone Frazier’s parents.… Maybe they’ve heard something more.”

  “I was getting ready to call you,” Frazier’s mother told her when Florence was able to make the connection. They had received the same telegram, she said, but nothing more.

  “I can live with that,” Annie admitted. “At least for a while—and he did say it was a small problem, didn’t he?”

  Charlie! She must tell Charlie! Telegram in hand, Annie cut through the backyard and ran across Katherine Street to find Charlie in the kitchen making tuna croquettes for the noon meal. Was it almost time for dinner? Except for the arrival of the telegram, she had little recollection of the rest of the morning.

  At the news, Charlie forgot her hands were covered in raw egg and cracker crumbs and threw her arms around Annie, flinging gobs of breading about. “I’m so happy for you! I can’t tell you how relieved I am.…” And she sank onto a kitchen chair and cried into her apron.

  “Why, Charlie…” Annie knelt beside her. “What’s wrong? This is good news. Why are you crying? Will’s all right, isn’t he? Odessa told us about your getting all those letters.”

  “It’s what was in the letters,” Charlie began. “I didn’t want to tell you, worry you even more, but Will had to ditch his plane. He’s in a hospital in England.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? What happened? Is he going to be all right?”

  “I didn’t know myself until all those letters came at once. It had been a while since I’d heard from him, so I was getting more concerned than usual.”

  Charlie rose and washed her hands at the sink. “It happened near the end of July, during a raid over France. The Germans shot out his engine and it caught on fire. Will said he managed to jettison the engine and was trying to make his way back to England when the plane began to plummet over the English Channel.”

  Annie stiffened, finding it hard to breathe. This easily could have happened to her brother, Joel, as well. “Dear God! How terrifying, Charlie! What happened then?”

  Charlie wiped away her tears with a dish towel and smiled. “He pulled the rip cord on his parachute.”

  “And then what?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Will doesn’t remember. He woke up in a hospital a day or so later. He has a broken collarbone and is pretty banged up, but he’s going to be all right.” She sighed. “Frankly, I hope they’ll keep him there until this awful war’s over.”

  * * *

  That evening, Phoebe brought out a bottle of champagne a former boarder had given her and invited Charlie to join them in a toast to all their brave men. Even Odessa, a strict teetotaler, downed her portion without protest.

  Miss Dimple was in the front yard the next morning, clipping a few roses for the table, when Clay’s sister, Loretta, pulled into the driveway and hurried toward her. Dimple’s first thought on seeing her was that something had happened concerning Clay, and she became so careless with what she was doing that she received a bad jab from a rose thorn.

  Laying the flowers aside, she quickly wound a clean handkerchief around the bleeding finger and went to meet her. “What is it, Loretta?”

  “You asked me to let you know if I remembered where I’d seen the card you were telling us about—the one that said ‘Bold Victory’ with the combined initials. Well, this morning when I first woke up, it came to me. It was Mrs. Kirkland—you know, the one with all those names.”

  Loretta followed Miss Dimple to the porch, where they sat in the shade. “I was helping Daddy in the Peach Shed a few weeks ago and she had written down what she wanted on the back of a card like that. I remember thinking it was an interesting name, and I believe I commented on it, but she said she’d just picked up the card from her son when he was at home a few
days before.”

  “Chenault.” Miss Dimple nodded.

  “Do you think Chenault had anything to do with what happened to Leola and Prentice?”

  Miss Dimple hesitated before speaking. “I think it would be worth our while to find out,” she said. “I wouldn’t mention this to anyone else yet, Loretta. Let me think about it a bit and I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  Who would best be able to find out about the mysterious company in Florida? She couldn’t think of one person in Elderberry who might be able to help her. Miss Dimple took the roses into the kitchen to arrange in Phoebe’s lovely blue crystal bowl. It would have to be someone who had the means and incentive to look into this on Clay Jarrett’s behalf.… Miss Dimple jammed a rose stem into the bowl and pricked another finger. Why, his attorney, of course! Chloe had told her the lawyer’s name. Someone from Atlanta, she said, and he was supposed to be one of the best. Tisdale, Chloe had said. Curtis Tisdale.

  Dimple put the roses in water and went to the telephone to call the Jarretts.

  * * *

  On meeting the attorney at the Jarretts’, Miss Dimple was surprised to learn that she had gone to college with his aunt Lavinia at Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville and had, in fact, roomed across the hall from her in the large drafty house heated by fireplaces.

  “I’ve heard stories about how you girls used to secretly make fudge on the hearth,” he reminded her once introductions were made. He had immediately driven from Atlanta when Knox Jarrett telephoned him about the possible connection between Leola’s death, and, ultimately, Prentice’s, and the unknown company in Florida.

  After learning of Jasper’s statement, Curtis had spent some time attempting to interview him, but had come away unconvinced of the man’s testimony. “I believe he did see someone set that fire,” he told them, “but I have serious doubts as to whether it would hold up in court. Jasper, I’m afraid, doesn’t come across as a very reliable witness.”