When Will the Dead Lady Sing? Page 11

  Lance didn’t seem to feel well, either. He kept pulling out soft pieces of his roll and pilling them between his fingers, until his bread plate must have had a fair-sized pile of dollhouse biscuits. Sometimes he’d whip out a pen and jot down something. I saw him pick up his fork a few times and dab at his plate, but never saw him carry a bite to his mouth. And he kept looking at his watch like he was timing the proceedings.

  Renée kept watching him and chewing her bottom lip.

  Between dinner and the speaker, Hubert roamed around the room talking to various people. When he got to my table, he leaned over and said, “Don’t worry about the bum in my barn. I’m taking care of that situation.” I didn’t have time to reply, because he had to go to the mike to introduce the program.

  Burlin took the podium with a smile. “We sure are having a good time in Hopemore, folks. This afternoon we men got in a great round of golf at your lovely country club, my sister Abigail took a ten-mile bike ride through your pretty countryside, and the other women got well-deserved naps.”

  “Not me,” Georgia called. “I was writing thank-you notes.”

  He chuckled. “See? At any time of day or night, there’s always one Bullock working for you.” I don’t know why, but the audience laughed. Burlin went on. “But the one who’s planning to do the most for you in the near future is my son, Lance. Hubert, here, asked me to speak tonight on the changing economic face of Georgia, but Lance is the one with the facts at his fingertips. So, Lance? Come up here and tell these folks what you know.”

  Hubert looked real put out. Lance got up slowly, like he wasn’t sure how he’d be received. But Edward started clapping, and Binky, Georgia, and Renée followed his lead. In another second, all the sheep in the room were putting hands together like they’d wanted Lance all along. I knew they’d rather have had Burlin than his son, so I didn’t clap, even though Georgia gave me a bright smile and clapped above the table so I could get the hint.

  Instead, I looked around the room—a sea of white faces dotted with a couple of black ones and one Mexican restaurant owner—and figured that no matter what Lance had to say, the economic face of Georgia still had a lot of changing to do.

  Lance had some changing to do, too, if he planned to make memorable public speeches. He was long on statistics and short on humor. Or maybe his speaking had been a late idea, and he’d had to write his speech during dinner. Maybe that’s what they’d been quarreling about, and why Lance had failed to eat.

  If it had been Edward’s idea to stick us with Lance, he should have at least stuck around to hear the speech. Instead, he’d pulled out his cell phone almost as soon as Lance started talking, listened a second, then hurried out. He didn’t return until Lance was winding up half an hour later. I was surprised to see it was only 8:15. As long as the speech had seemed, I’d thought it was well past my bedtime.

  Hubert took the mike again. “Lance, Burlin, are you all willing to stick around here a little longer to answer any questions about the upcoming election?”

  Lance looked up like he was going to refuse, but Burlin had already called, “Sure. We’d be glad to.” People applauded, on cue. I saw Renée touch Lance’s arm and say something. He shook his head.

  “You want to stay?” Joe Riddley asked.

  “I need to walk Lulu.” We’d brought her and the pups home after the fire and installed them in a basket on Bo’s porch.

  “I walked her before we came. Had plenty of time while you were primping.”

  I started to insist that I hadn’t been primping, but the truth was, I’d been spending more time in front of my mirror since the Bullocks came to town. Women like Georgia tend to do that to me. So I said, “I’d still like to go home.”

  Joe Riddley knew my mind was on Tad. He handed me his keys. “Go ahead, then. Take the car. I’ll walk home. I need the exercise.” I hurried out before he could remember it was his new car he’d just handed over.

  Near the front door, I ran into Gusta, Georgia, and Renée surrounded by a cluster of other women. Binky hovered in the background. Gusta stuck out her cane to bar my way. “Good evening, MacLaren. I was hoping to catch you. Georgia, here, is driving me home and stopping by for a little while. Lottie’s made a special dessert. I want you to join us.”

  “I’m sorry—” I began.

  She leaned so close I could smell the fixative she used on her back bridge. “You’ll be sorrier if you go home. This whole crowd is coming. If you don’t join us, it will look like you’re avoiding the Bullocks because of that silly picture—or mooning over what might have been. Come on. Act natural and show the world you don’t care what the papers say.”

  Gusta had a point. She also had considerable experience in acting natural no matter what the papers said. They’d been brutal to her granddaddy when state funds went missing while he was governor, to her brother while he drank his way through three terms in the Senate, and to her husband after somebody discovered how many slum properties he owned in Hope County. If Gusta went through all that with her dignity intact, she could certainly teach me a thing or two.

  Besides, Joe Riddley had eaten my dessert. “For a little while,” I agreed.

  Georgia took a couple of steps and winced. “Augusta, do you mind if we run by the Inn first so I can change shoes? These are too tight.” That ensured that everybody looked down at her silver pumps. She lifted one shoe, splattered with mud. “To make matters worse, I wore them on a little walk this evening and got them filthy. I’ll hurry right in and be back before you know it.” She turned to Binky, who was hovering at the edge of the crowd. “Abigail? Will you drive Gusta?”

  Abigail shook her head. “I’m not going to be able to go. I’ve got work to do.”

  “I’ll drive Gusta,” I offered.

  Gusta frowned. “You drive like a maniac.”

  Georgia, though, turned to me with a grateful smile. “Would you? Thanks! Renée and I will be there almost as quick as you are.”

  The other women giggled as they hurried to their own cars. Few of them ever got invited to dessert at Gusta’s, and potential First Ladies don’t often come to Hopemore—although I didn’t see much future for Renée as First Lady of Georgia if she didn’t learn to occasionally say a civil word to some of the electorate.

  I pulled all the way down Gusta’s drive so she could use the ramp at the back door, and other cars pulled in behind me. We trooped into the living room where Pooh waited in a wing chair, wearing a pantsuit of soft pink knit with a scarf to match. Lottie always made sure she looked pretty for company.

  When she saw us all, she clapped her hands in childish delight. “A party! How nice of you all to come.” Then she turned to Lottie, who was hovering in the dining room doorway and murmured anxiously, “Do we have anything to serve?”

  Lottie’s tan face looked worried, but that was her natural expression. Nobody in the room doubted that we’d get something delicious. “Pecan pie and ice cream. It’s all set out here in the dining room. Miss Gusta and I thought that’s what you’d like to serve.”

  Pooh dabbed at tears with a wisp of white handkerchief. “You are both so good to me.”

  “Will you please bring her a plate, Lottie?” Gusta’s voice wavered a little. I knew she hated to see her old friend like that.

  “I sure will, Miss Gusta. I’ve already fixed it for her.” Lottie would never let on to Pooh that her own pie had been made without sugar, to help control her diabetes.

  None of the rest of us would eat until Georgia and Renée arrived, so we sat there chatting of this and that. I moved over by Pooh and told her about our fire. “Did you get the cows out?” she worried, fork halfway to her mouth.

  “It was Daddy who kept cows, Pooh. Joe Riddley and I used our barn for tractors.”

  “Oh. Did the tractors burn up?”

  “No, we got everything out. Even Lulu and her new pups.”

  “Oh, does Lulu have pups? I don’t know what I’d do without my Saint Bernard.” She told me some
thing her dog had done that very afternoon, forgetting he’d been dead five years.

  As I sat there wondering what else we could discuss, the hall clock boomed nine. “That clock sounds much grander than ours,” I told her. “I don’t remember it being here before.”

  “It’s Gusta’s,” she confided. What leap of brain waves took her from that clock straight to lucidity? She leaned over and patted my hand and said in the clear voice we seldom heard anymore, “And it’s telling you it’s time to stop worrying about that silly picture in the paper. It will do Joe Riddley good not to take you so much for granted.”

  She would have to speak in one of those times when the whole room had fallen silent. The eyes of every woman there flocked to me faster than flies to fresh-cut watermelon.

  I had never been rude to Pooh in my life, but I can’t answer for what I might have said if Georgia and Renée hadn’t arrived right then. Georgia rushed in breathlessly, wearing her patriotic shoes. Her face was flushed and excited, and she was laughing at herself. “I know you all won’t believe me, but we have been so lost. Renée told me to turn left at the light, but I didn’t listen. So I don’t know where we’ve been, but it took me fifteen minutes to find the courthouse, didn’t it Renée?”

  “At least.” Renée raised one hand to hide what looked like a yawn. Then she gave us an embarrassed smile. “Sorry for holding everybody up.”

  Southern women jealously guard our right to bear the guilt of the world. None of us can stand for other people to think they are at fault.

  “We didn’t mind waiting—we were talking,” said one.

  “It’s easy to get lost in this silly town,” said another. “All those new subdivisions with winding streets.”

  “Even our old roads wander along tracks where it used to be easiest for wagons to go,” put in a third.

  “Or cows,” chimed in a fourth. “I sometimes think the whole place was laid out by cows.”

  “We aren’t as bad as Atlanta,” another said regretfully, “where every street crosses every other street two or three times, but you sure can’t turn right three times in Hopemore and expect to come out where you started.” She sounded like that was something the Chamber of Commerce ought to advertise as a tourist attraction.

  Comparing Hopemore, population thirteen thousand, with Atlanta was carrying things a bit far, so I said, “At least in Hopemore you can find a familiar landmark in a few minutes. The important thing is, you got here.”

  Gusta gave me the closest she ever came to a smile and said graciously to Georgia and Renée, “Won’t you come to the dining room and try some of Lottie’s pecan pie?”

  Coffee was always served from a silver pot at Gusta Wainwright’s, and between them, she and Pooh had enough china and silver to serve a quarter of Hopemore. We balanced fine china on our laps, enjoyed Lottie’s excellent pie, set our cups and saucers on marble-topped mahogany tables, and listened to Georgia. Amazingly, Gusta let her preside.

  To give her credit, Georgia didn’t start talking politics right away. First she admired Gusta’s dishes and talked about her own porcelain collection. Then she asked intelligent questions about Hopemore and listened to the answers. Only gradually did she start telling us how great Lance was and some of his impressive ideas for bringing Georgia up to Bullock standards.

  Every now and then she would turn to Renée and ask, “Isn’t that right, honey?” and Renée would smile and nod. Georgia could have brought along a doll with a bobble head and achieved about the same results. Renée must not have found Lance’s political opinions quite as fascinating as Georgia did, either. I caught her stifling a couple of yawns.

  Still, at one point when Georgia paused for a breath, Renée looked around and said, “You all have the prettiest walks around here. I went down a gravel road this morning and found a real nice pond with a little dock. It was the most peaceful place I’ve seen in a long time.”

  “Must be Hubert’s pond,” one woman suggested.

  “Just down from your old place, Mac,” another said—as if I might have forgotten, having been gone from it for a month.

  “This state needs a lot of peaceful places,” Georgia picked up, quick as a whip. “Lance has ideas for parks you wouldn’t believe. I hope you all are going to turn out to vote for him, so he can get busy putting some of his marvelous ideas into practice, for the good of us all.”

  The way she said it, we were a group of her most special friends who would, of course, vote for Lance as a personal favor to her. I even flirted with the notion for a second. I’d never known a governor personally. But I felt we ought to get something on the table and settle whether it was true or not. “Did I hear he’s thinking of switching parties?”

  Renée shifted in her chair and bent over her cup, so I couldn’t see her face. Georgia beamed like I’d just asked the right question. “I’m so glad you brought that up. Lance feels that party isn’t as important as issues, and that he is uniquely qualified to work with members of both parties for the good of the state.”

  “Is that a ‘yes’?” I persisted.

  She shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him. You know, Mackie, that all I do is follow Burlin around and do whatever he says.”

  That stewed my goose as far as the others were concerned. If Georgia Bullock called me “Mackie”—especially with that “you know” and the intimate way she said her brother’s name—I must be privileged to know things about him the others didn’t. Every married woman in that room would go home and tell her husband that what the paper said was true. One of those husbands would mention to Joe Riddley that he’d never realized I was so friendly with the Bullocks. I didn’t want to think what might happen then.

  I started to get up from my chair to leave, then caught Gusta’s eye. If I didn’t stay there and tough it out, she would never let me hear the last of it. So I swallowed my pie and said, “I don’t know you all that well, Georgia, but I sure will be asking Lance that question.” Then I got up and went for more coffee.

  The women were so enjoying their evening with celebrities—and their rare invitation to Gusta’s—that nobody made a move to leave before eleven. When the clock chimed, Georgia gasped. “We may be locked out! Annie Dale locks the door at eleven and goes to bed, and she gave Burlin the front-door key for all of us. Unless he’s already home and waiting in the hall, we’ll have the dickens of a time getting in. I guess we’ll see how good we are at tossing pebbles at a window.” She laughed, but I could see she was anxious.

  “Lance will be up,” Renée assured her.

  “And I’ll call Annie Dale.” Gusta went to do so immediately. She returned to assure them, “She’ll wait up for another half hour.”

  “Can you find your way back that fast?” somebody asked. The others laughed, comfortable enough to tease the Bullocks by then.

  Renée gave us a wink. “I’ll drive this time.”

  I left in the middle of that hilarity. Georgia struck me as the kind of Southerner who might have to talk awhile at the door after she’d said she was leaving. Only when I got outside did I remember that my car—Joe Riddley’s car—was blocked. I didn’t want to have to go back and organize several women to back down the drive to let me out, so I walked home. I figured that Joe Riddley would either be out hunting Tad in one of our business trucks, or be engrossed in the eleven o’clock news when I got home, and I’d get up before him, so with any luck, I could get the car back in our garage before he missed it.

  As it turned out, only Lulu, Bo, and the pups were there to greet me. The pups snored softly in their basket. Bo opened one eye on the back porch and asked in a sleepy voice, “You and who else?” Lulu danced around my feet with great joy, having already given me up for dead. That’s how beagles always welcome you, being the most fatalistic creatures God ever made.

  I gave her a treat and let her curl up beside me on the couch while I watched the tail end of the news. Then I went to bed. By the time Joe Riddley started banging around just after midnight, gett
ing ready for bed, I was fast asleep.

  At least, that’s my story. I’m sticking to it.

  10

  Tuesday, Lulu started barking on the back porch before sunrise. At the old house, I’d have simply let her out. Here, she’d need a leash, so I might as well get dressed and take her for a walk. Joe Riddley was burrowed under the sheet, good for another hour. I figured Lulu and I could walk over to Gusta’s and bring his car back. I took the keys and my cell phone, in the unlikely case some deputy needed me before I got home. Crime is slow around here at dawn.

  It was a gray pearl morning, with no color in the sky yet except a smudge of peach to the east. The air lay on my shoulders like a damp blanket—it was, after all, Georgia in September—but there was none of the scorching heat of a month before. The birds were having a fine old convention before humans got up. Up on Oglethorpe, a few cars were carrying folks to work in distant towns. A couple of buzzards circled lazily, high in the sky.

  I couldn’t remember walking around town that early before, and was happy to live in a town so small that I could smell country even in the heart of it. I headed up Oglethorpe to fetch Joe Riddley’s car, but got distracted by our new window display. Bethany and Hollis were working for us after school and had filled the window with gift baskets of garden implements for women. They’d done a real good job. I might want one of those myself.

  Our store was a block west of the courthouse and Gusta and Pooh lived a block east. As Lulu and I moseyed through the square, I noted that the buzzards must have found something. Six now floated in wide spirals overhead. I got so busy wondering how exactly it is that they spot a small dead animal from that height and send out invitations to their friends, I scarcely noticed when Lulu steered me down a side street toward the tracks.

  The area by the railroad tracks is not a part of town I frequent. Years ago, when the train passed through Hopemore and stopped twice a day, we had a station, several warehouses, and a cotton gin down there. Now, the tracks were overgrown with weeds and the buildings deserted, except for a cotton warehouse Meriwether DuBose had recently refurbished for her new catalogue business. The Chamber of Commerce talked about revitalizing the area, but nobody else had caught the vision yet.