When Will the Dead Lady Sing? Read online

  “He said a friend swiped them from his parents’ stash while they were at work. Tad swears this is the first time he’s tried it, but Bethany says he looked pretty experienced. I don’t know whether to tell Walker and Cindy, or hope his little chat with Ridd will do the trick. Why do these things always happen when a kid’s parents are away?”

  “It’s a law of the universe, honey, just like the law that says toilets will overflow and furnaces break when your husband leaves town. It was part of Eve’s curse in the Garden of Eden. Somebody just omitted it from the text.”

  As I had hoped, a gurgle of laughter rolled over the line. I love Martha’s laugh. It reminds me of a stream running over rocks. “Oh, well, I guess we’ll get through this. It’s just one more of life’s little stretching experiences. Are you still planning on walking with me tonight?”

  Martha and I both tend to be a little rounder than we’d like to be, so we’d decided to begin walking around the high-school track each evening.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there. But I called to ask you a question. What would you do if you had a buffalo in your yard?”

  “Call a cowboy?” From the tentative way she said it, I knew she was waiting for a punch line. After all, she did live with a four-year-old who loved silly riddles. Before I could say anything else, she returned to her own problem. “I guess I’ll have to tell Cindy and Walker, but do you think I ought to call them in New York, or just wait until they get home?”

  I peered around the door as I thought that over. My problem had abandoned the grass and was now moseying across the yard toward Joe Riddley’s new silver Town Car. “Wait until they get home. I gotta go. Call you later.”

  I announced loudly from the safety of the kitchen door, “That two-ton horned dog is about to test-drive your new car.”

  That got Joe Riddley’s attention. He’d bought the car in August to celebrate the anniversary of the day he’d gotten shot and survived to tell the story.3 He would scarcely let me ride in it, he was so scared I’d leave a scratch on the finish.

  Joe Riddley heaved the sigh men reserve for times when they think a woman who expects equality in other areas ought to be able to cope with the present situation—a dead rat in the pantry, a flat tire in the rain, a buffalo on the front lawn. He shoved back his chair, strode to the front door, threw it wide open, and stopped dead. “By golly, it is a buffalo. Hi-ya! Get away from that car!” Waving his arms, he dashed into the yard.

  The animal had been ambling peacefully across the grass, but he stopped, turned, and lowered his head. I could see the headline in next week’s Hopemore Statesman: “Former Judge Trampled to Death.”

  I might get mad at the old coot from time to time, but I didn’t want him flattened by a buffalo. I ran after him in my red-striped coffee coat and red slippers. “Get back in here!” I grabbed his arm and tugged.

  The buffalo headed toward the excitement.

  Do you know how fast a buffalo can run?

  I never found out. Joe Riddley grabbed me around the waist, lifted me from the ground, and hightailed it to the porch. “That red must be making him mad,” he gasped as he slammed the front door behind us.

  Trust him to blame me. I’d have pointed out that he was the fool who went outside in the first place, but I was too busy trying to breathe. Besides, some of the best advice Mama ever gave me was, “Honey, you’ll stay married a lot longer if you don’t make a war out of every arrow aimed in your direction.”

  We leaned against the door panting for breath, our two hearts thundering as one. I didn’t hear a thundering buffalo on the front stoop, though, so I dared to look out the front window. The buffalo had stopped about ten feet from our front step and was looking at the door with an expression that said “If that was the morning’s entertainment, I want my money back.”

  Joe Riddley was still pressed against the door. How long did he think he could hold it against a determined buffalo?

  “Call animal control,” he ordered. “I’ll keep an eye on him.” He locked the dead bolt—did he expect the animal to try the knob?—and moved to the front window. “Hurry. He’s looking at my car again.”

  Animal control wasn’t open, so I called the police. After all, as a county magistrate, I regularly get up and drive down to the sheriff’s detention center in the middle of the night to save deputies the trouble of coming to me. I figured it was time somebody paid back the favor.

  Royce Wharton, a deputy who regularly had the night shift and had roused me four times in the past month, answered. “Hey, Royce. This is Judge Yarbrough. Can you send somebody over here to remove a buffalo from our front lawn?”

  I had to hold the receiver six inches from my ear to keep from being deafened by his laugh. “Our cowhands haven’t arrived yet, Judge, but as soon as one gallops in, I’ll send him over.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” I informed him. “We have a buffalo in our yard, and if you don’t help me deal with it, you’d better call somebody else next time you need a judge to sign a warrant.”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “What does it matter what it’s doing? It’s there. What do you suggest we do? And I don’t want to hear a smart aleck answer, either.”

  “No, ma’am, but I don’t know what to suggest. We don’t do buffalo.”

  I was about to suggest that he didn’t do much of anything when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the blasted animal was wandering happily across the yard in a new direction.

  “My roses!” I slammed down the receiver and grabbed the broom. The way Joe Riddley tells it, I mounted the broom, flew out the front door, and zoomed over the yard. I didn’t, of course, but I was determined to save those roses. I’d transplanted them from our old yard, and had grown them originally from Mama’s cuttings. I wasn’t going to lose them to any varmint, even if he had strayed fifteen hundred miles and a hundred and fifty years off course.

  “Get out of here! Out! You hear me?”

  I yelled at the top of my lungs and waved my broom. I was just about to bring it down on the creature’s hump when I heard a shout.

  “Wait, Mackie! Don’t hit him. It’s okay. Sarge will get him.”

  A man in gray slacks and a yellow polo shirt stepped from behind the big Emily Brunner holly tree up by the street. Another man, short and stubby, hurried around him with a chain in his hand.

  The short man wore jeans and a green T-shirt and walked with a limp. “Hey, boy. Hey, boy.” He sidled toward the buffalo holding out something on one palm. That brute nuzzled his palm as nice as anything and let the man snap the chain through a loop hanging from its neck. “I’ll get him back in the truck,” he called to the taller man. He and the buffalo strolled amiably across the lawn and down the street.

  I wished I could go with them. I’d rather walk a buffalo than remain where I was.

  Every woman worth her salt has at least one guilty secret in her past. Mine was staring me in the face.

  2

  “Hey, Mackie, surprised to see me?” Burlin Bullock squinted against the morning sun. I wished a sinkhole would open in our lawn and swallow one of us. I wasn’t particular about which one.

  Mama always said that women who don’t fix their faces before they come out of their rooms in the morning are asking Fate to fix their wagons. I stood in the early-morning sunlight wearing no makeup whatsoever, my hair at its day-before-beauty-parlor worst, dressed in fuzzy slippers and one of those snap-front coffee coats that are so easy to throw on. Why hadn’t I developed a taste for flaming-orange satin pajamas with matching high-heel mules?

  Burlin was handsomer at sixty-four than he’d been at twenty. His smile had always been wide and attractive, but over the years it had chiseled deep lines into his face that passed for character. His once-blond hair was now silver, but still thick and straight, parted on the left. His gray slacks had a crease you could use to slit boxes, his yellow polo shirt was soft as butter, and his black loafers were polished so the shine hurt my eyes. Or maybe that was the
sun’s reflection off his gold Rolex watch. He smelled like he’d just come out of the shower, and although he’d put on weight since I’d seen him last, it suited him. Mama would have said he’d finally grown into his potential.

  Burlin always had considerable potential. When we were both at the University of Georgia, he’d been president of the drama club and a steadily rising star in student government. He’d gone on to Yale Law School, with an eye to following his daddy’s footsteps in Georgia politics, but he’d done his daddy one better: He had served a couple of terms in Congress.

  Now his gray eyes twinkled down at me from his tanned face. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Burlin was always tanned. These days, he docked a sail-boat at Lake Lanier, owned a condo at St. Simons Island, and went out several times each winter to ski in Colorado. How did I know? Because he was a regular guest on one of Joe Riddley’s favorite talk shows, was often asked to sit in on newscasts to comment on national situations, and was a familiar face in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. We seldom went a month in Georgia without seeing Burlin in the paper for something. He was the kind of politician men admire and women adore.

  For one moment of treachery to all the life experiences that have made me who I am, I wished I could strip off my face and look twenty again, and I gathered my wits to say something intelligent. “What the dickens are you doing here?”

  He shifted so the sun wasn’t right in his eyes. “My boy is running for governor, you know.” Of course I knew. The election wasn’t for another year, but the campaign had been in the paper for months. Lance Bullock was one of two strong candidates in our party, and with none in the other, whoever won next year’s primary was likely to get elected.

  However, having Lance run for governor was one thing. Having Burlin in my front yard was another—particularly when he said, “We’re running his campaign out of Hopemore for the next week or so and staying down at the Annie Dale Inn. I guess you know it?”

  I guess I did. Annie Dale Wilson was a year younger than me, and we’d bicycled all over town together, growing up. We’d drifted apart during junior and senior high— Annie Dale got a little wild back then—and lost touch after I went to college and she stayed home to work, but we still enjoyed an occasional chat or a wave when she passed me on her bike. Annie Dale was still a serious biker and spent two weeks each year bicycling in a different country.

  “We’re proud of Annie Dale,” I told Burlin. “Some people scoffed when she turned the old house her granddaddy built after he retired from the railroad into an inn. They said she’d never make a go of it because it’s too close to the tracks. But trains don’t come through town anymore, and she’s had folks from thirty-nine states, so far, and a lot of weekend wedding parties. Having a gubernatorial candidate will really float her boat.”

  “It’s handy for us. She’s turned the whole second floor over to us, including a sitting room we can use for an office.”

  “Still, Hopemore is a funny place for a campaign center,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It’s the county seat of Hope County, has several thousand voters, is centrally located between I-20 and I-16, and you’re here.” He smiled down into my eyes. When I didn’t rise to that lure, he added, “Besides, it’s smack in the middle of everything, including the gnat line.” He ruefully scratched one arm.

  I’d already noticed the pesky creatures nibbling my ankles in the tall grass. We’d had a lot of rain that week, and our grandson Tad hadn’t mowed yet. I surreptitiously rubbed one ankle with the top of my other foot and wondered why Burlin’s son’s campaign couldn’t be run out of some other deserving town to save me from my current predicament.

  Burlin reached out one hand toward me, but I stepped away. His voice was low and husky. “You’ve still got those big brown eyes, and your hair is just like I remember it. The very same shade of honey brown.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him about the part my hairdresser, Phyllis, plays in the color of my hair. Instead, I took another step back and demanded, “Did you put that buffalo in my yard?”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Same old Mackie.”

  Nobody but Burlin ever called me Mackie. For the first time in minutes I remembered Joe Riddley sitting in the dining room with nothing but a window screen to keep him from hearing every word we said.

  Burlin was easy and relaxed, not the least bit worried about whether my husband was listening. “I wondered how long it would take you to get your dander up again. The buffalo is Lance’s mascot. See?” He fished in his pocket and handed me a red button with the white silhouette of a buffalo and navy blue words: BULLOCK GIVES YOU NO BULL.

  He chuckled. “I asked Sarge to let him graze your yard a little this morning, figuring maybe it would get your attention and lure you out of the house.” He waved away my attempt to hand him back the button. “Keep it. We’ve got thousands.”

  “I won’t wear it,” I warned. “I’m a magistrate, and I never display a political endorsement on my property or my person.”

  It’s just as well I hadn’t expected him to be impressed. He shrugged and said, “Then put it in your jewelry box.”

  I would drop it in my kitchen wastebasket, but I didn’t need to say so. Besides, he wasn’t giving me time to say anything. “I tried to see you last evening. We got to town before dinnertime, and I wanted to look you up before it got dark, but when I found the address listed in the phone book—a big blue house out in the country—there was a crew of kids playing softball in the front yard. I asked where you lived, and one of them said you moved here last month.”

  “We did. That house was built by my husband’s great-granddaddy, and it’s a family tradition to deed it to the oldest child. We finally got around to doing that in August.”

  “It’s gorgeous.” He looked at the front of our small brick home. “You must really miss it. It was real private, too.” He glanced back over his shoulder.

  That reminded me how close our new neighbors were. They probably were hovering behind curtains, watching me entertain a man while wearing my pajamas. “I do miss the privacy,” I admitted. “After living for thirty-five years at the end of a gravel road, with the nearest neighbor a quarter of a mile away, having folks across the street feels a bit like living onstage.”

  The truth was, I missed a lot of things about the big old house. I missed turning down our road after work and leaving the whole world behind. I missed eating on our big screened porch, or reading out there while fireflies punctuated the dusk. I missed sleeping where the only sounds were owls, nighthawks, crickets, frogs by our pool, and an occasional truck grinding gears up on the highway. I missed high ceilings and big dim rooms, the smells of new-mown hay, honeysuckle, and the gardenias I’d planted near the house. I even missed Joe Riddley’s noisy hunting dogs, who had stayed behind in their outside pen. I greatly missed my swimming pool.

  But I wasn’t admitting more to Burlin than I admitted to anybody else, so I told him what I told them: “Some folks get real teary about leaving their homeplace, but Joe Riddley and I aren’t two of them. We like walking to work and church, and appreciate this little yard after taking care of five acres. We’re glad not to have stairs to climb, and our housekeeper finds it a lot easier to clean six rooms than eleven. Of course, she grumbles about our ‘little bitty kitchen,’ but she used to grumble about having to walk so far between the stove and the sink. Grumbling is Clarinda’s preferred mode of conversation.”

  “You cry only in your own bathroom, right?” Burlin always did see right through my scalp to my private thoughts. It disconcerted me back then, and it annoyed me now.

  “Not very often. I like this house. We brought most of the things we liked best with us—including some of Mama’s roses, which your dratted buffalo nearly trampled. If it had—”

  His held up both hands and backed away, laughing. “Hey, it didn’t. I came to the rescue, remember? And I grow roses, too. What kinds do you have?” He headed in their direction
with his usual purposeful stride. Burlin always gave his full attention to anything that interested him.

  I sighed. Why hadn’t I paid attention when Mama was trying to teach me the graceful way to get rid of unwanted guests? Next thing I knew, we were standing side by side discussing varieties of roses, and Burlin was prosing on about his attempt to develop a new variety. Suddenly he interrupted himself to demand, “Have you stayed married all these years to the same fellow?”

  “He’s changed a bit over the years, but he’s basically the same fellow. How about you?”

  That was a low blow and I instantly regretted it. Thirty years ago, Burlin’s wife had been notorious for drunk and disorderly behavior. I’d felt a secret sympathy for the woman—any woman married to a Bullock would need some solace. In years since then, I’d seen pictures of Burlin with several other attractive women—most often his sister Georgia—but I hadn’t seen a picture of his wife in ages.

  He rubbed one hand along his long jaw. “I didn’t do so good. I married a folk singer—she gave it up, of course, when we married—and she developed a drinking problem. Maybe you read about her accident—”

  Everybody in America had read about her accident. During Burlin’s second term in Congress, Sperra Bullock ran over and killed a five-year-old boy in Virginia, then sped away. A bystander got the tag number, though, and she’d been arrested that same night. In court, she had tried to get off by claiming she was in an alcoholic blackout. That infuriated people. Then she got into several shouting matches and one hair-pulling fight with the mother of the dead child, who wanted the court to take Sperra’s five-year-old son away to atone for the loss of her own. It had been the kind of nasty, brawling case the media loves. Sperra went to prison and Burlin finished out his term. He never ran for another elected office.

  “Was that why you decided not to run for re-election?” I asked now.

  “Partly,” he admitted, “but I also decided I prefer to work behind the scenes. I had a history teacher back in junior high who said something I’ve never forgotten: ‘The history of Georgia is men who loved this state and cared enough about her to give their lives to making her great.’ That’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”