Who Invited the Dead Man? Page 2

  “Oh. Well, it’s a gorgeous house.” Then she stepped out of her reporter shoes to ask, “But aren’t you nervous, living way down a dirt road so far from the highway?”

  “It’s a gravel road.” I spoke a mite tartly, thinking of the fortune we’d invested in gravel over the years. “And it’s just half a mile. Besides, we’ve got good neighbors.”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “Just two other houses, and one of them is empty.”

  Considering that one owner of the place on the corner had been a killer and another a kook, empty was a vast improvement. I didn’t want to go into that, however. “We love it down here. It’s very quiet except for crickets, owls, and frogs.”

  “Oh.” The way she kept tapping her toe on the floor, quiet wasn’t something she valued. She peered at her questions again. “Did you always want to be a magistrate?”

  “Heavens no. I think the main reason they chose me is because I went to magistrate school with Joe Riddley so many times, and have watched him do magistrate business for thirty years in our office. Our son Walker, though, swears the county appointed me so they could save money by recycling the Judge Yarbrough sign on our office door.”

  “Could you, uh, tell me something about your husband’s, uh, accident? What happened, and how you, uh, felt?” She had prepared that question ahead of time and was still embarrassed to ask it. Most people were embarrassed to talk about Joe Riddley right then.

  “It happened too fast for me to feel anything. Everything changed in less than a minute. One night in August Joe Riddley went down the road looking for our beagle, who’d escaped her pen. A killer thought Joe Riddley was on his trail, and shot him. Luckily Joe Riddley had bent toward Lulu at the time, so the bullet just grazed his head. The same man also shot Lulu.”1 “You’d never know it.” Across the lawn, Lulu was chasing a butterfly.

  I chuckled. “That bullet turned her into the fastest three-legged beagle in Georgia.”

  “And your husband?”

  How could I tell her that the bullet had turned Joe Riddley into a stranger? One evening I had a husband who was wise, gentle, funny, and occasionally grumpy, but who loved me more than life. When he woke up from his coma, I had a husband who could not read, who could not put words together in coherent sentences, who could not send signals to his legs to make them walk, who erupted in unexpected rages at the slightest thing, and who didn’t even seem to like me most of the time. Sometimes he got so mad at me I was afraid of him.

  That’s not what I told Kelly Keane, of course.

  “Joe Riddley’s injury is mild compared to many,” I said, quoting his doctor. “He ought to be back to normal eventually.” I didn’t add that “eventually” could seem like a very long time.

  She wrote a pretty good article, except she never mentioned Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery and she quoted Walker about that dratted sign.

  The next time I’d be in the paper would be in October, when Hiram Blaine was found dead in my dining room.

  2

  As I gathered up my pocketbook to leave, Clarinda asked, “You reckon I ought to hold back your dinner?”

  “Gusta didn’t ask me to eat, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Even if she had, you wouldn’t get much. That woman hates to lay out money she doesn’t have to. Speaking of laying out money, did you ever talk to the florist about centerpieces for the judge’s birthday party?”

  “No. Ridd says to put a pot of chrysanthemums on each table.”

  She rested both hands on her stout hips. “We don’t want to look like we’re advertising the store. Go over to Flowers ’R’ Us and talk to them. They did arrangements for our Sisterhood meeting at church, and they’re real good. Reasonable, too.”

  “Maybe I’ll talk to them, then.” We sounded, I thought, like two Old Testament wives planning a birthday party for our joint husband.

  I stopped by Joe Riddley’s room, where he was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. “I’m going to see Gusta and Meriwether.” He liked to know exactly where I would be.

  He gave me an anxious look and carefully pronounced every syllable. “Is ‘go see Meriwether’ in your log?”

  “I don’t have a log, honey. You have the log.” Joe Riddley’s log was a notebook in which we had to write down every blessed thing he needed to do in a day, so he could check on himself. His memory was slowly coming back, but he still couldn’t remember things like “get dressed,” “go to therapy,” “eat dinner.”

  I deposited a kiss on his head. “You be good, now, you hear me?”

  “I’ll be good or I’ll be careful.” His eyes had the ghost of a twinkle.

  It was a good thing I’d lived in that house more than thirty years, because my eyes were so blurred with tears I’d never have found my way to my car. It was real confusing, smack in the middle of all the strange things Joe Riddley’s brain was doing, for a shutter to go up and suddenly give me a glimpse of the man I’d loved all my life. Those were the times that shattered my self-control.

  Gusta lives on Oglethorpe, which has three blocks of fine Victorian houses and even three antebellum houses just down from the courthouse square. Gusta’s is one of the antebellums, spared by General Sherman on his comet-trail trip through town—“not by intent,” Gusta insists in her gravelly voice, “but because those Yankees had a hard time getting Georgia heart pine to burn.”

  Normally I didn’t mind driving behind gawking tourists, but that morning I was impatient. What could Meriwether be doing to get Gusta in such a tizzy? They’d had some rousing disagreements back when Meriwether was dead set on marrying Jed and Gusta was just as determined no granddaughter of hers would every marry a Blaine. But once Meriwether had come home with a broken heart, the two of them had never disagreed on anything more serious than which author should speak at the Friends of the Library banquet.

  Gusta’s son, Garlon, now that was another matter. When her husband died, Gusta inherited everything. Garlon had a good job in the cotton mills and a nice bequest from his first wife, but when Gusta sold the mills, he wanted her to advance him funds out of his daddy’s estate to buy himself a business. Gusta refused. She said she already had enough business to keep Garlon busy, since Lamar had owned real estate as well as the mills, and had a good bit of stock. Joe Riddley always said that’s when Garlon realized he’d moved back to his mother’s house lock, stock, and soul.

  The noise of their discussions kept the neighbors up for several weeks. Then Garlon stormed out of the house, arranged his own financing for the business, and bought a nice town house across town. After Meriwether went to college, he went down to a New Orleans business convention and brought back Candi—who, Gusta claimed, jumped out of a cake into his lap. Of course, Gusta had been known to stretch the truth a bit when it served her prejudices.

  Candi had wide blue eyes, curly peroxide hair, and a knack for making Garlon laugh. Meriwether seemed to like her well enough at first. She divided her time between their town house and Gusta’s house on her college vacations. But when she came home for good and found Garlon and Candi fixing to move into a house he owned over on Liberty Street, she got furious. Some folks speculated she was jealous at seeing her daddy so happy when she was miserable. Others claimed she loathed that particular house. In any case, she refused to set foot in it. She was perfectly cordial to Garlon and Candi at her grandmother’s or in public, but she never visited them at home.

  It was half past eleven when I parked behind Gusta’s old black Cadillac. As I climbed out of my Nissan and worked my way past a big hydrangea planted too close to the drive, I had a sudden memory of Jed Blaine in high school, a shock of blond hair and a friendly freckled face, waiting behind that hydrangea for Meriwether to sneak out to tell him good night. He was never handsome, but he was always an endearing youngster.

  Gusta’s maid, Florine, ushered me onto Gusta’s large, screened side porch. Sun lay in wide warm bands across the red tile floor and brightened the faded floral cushions on Gusta
’s white wicker. Beyond the screens, bees buzzed the late-summer flowers and mockingbirds sang in the magnolia.

  Seeing Gusta in leaf-dappled sunlight, I was shocked at how much Garlon’s death had aged her. Up until now, although her hands were knotted with arthritis and her long spare frame stooped a bit, she had never looked old. Today, her face was lined and frail, and although her yellow cotton dress was fresh and every one of her iron-gray hairs knew its place, she looked older than the eighty I knew she was.

  Her gray eyes and tongue, however, were sharp as ever. “She’s hightailed it out of town,” she greeted me with satisfaction.

  “Meriwether?” Startled, I backed to a big wicker armchair and more fell into it than sat.

  “No, Candy cane. Florine,” she interrupted herself, “please tell Meriwether we have a guest and bring Judge Yarbrough a glass of tea.” Gusta had no problems adjusting to new titles. Florine, understanding those instructions, headed back to the kitchen to hold dinner until I left.

  Gusta would never do anything vulgar, like talk right away about whatever she’d hauled me all the way over there to discuss, so she asked, “How are you coming along with plans for your little party?”

  Gusta always considered other people’s parties “little,” but that morning I edified her. “It’s getting pretty big. We are even going to have dancing on the lawn.”

  She waved one bony hand through the air. “Oh, how I remember the parties Granddaddy used to have in the governor’s mansion. The people all loved him, of course.” They didn’t love him enough to vote him in for a second term, but I didn’t mention that.

  Meriwether herself brought the tea with a gaily flowered paper napkin. Thirty-two that year, tall and slender with blue-green eyes in a heart-shaped face and naturally blond curls that looked great with just a tad of frosting, she was far and away the prettiest unmarried woman in Hopemore, but her smile seemed a bit strained as she set the glass on a table near my chair. “It’s good to see you, Mac. We really appreciated the donation you sent the Heart Association in Daddy’s name.” She blinked a couple of times, because she had genuinely loved her daddy and her eyes had filled with tears, but a Wainwright seldom showed emotion in public.

  She took another wicker chair and stretched her long legs before her. They were shapely legs, ending in long aristocratic feet. I sipped my tea and thought that Meriwether had the prettiest skin I’d ever seen. Clarinda would have been hard put to find a wrinkle.

  Since I’d known Meriwether since she was a baby, I felt comfortable informing her, “I’ve come to talk sense into you, but you don’t look like you’ve lost what you already had.”

  “I haven’t. It’s just that Nana doesn’t think I’m old enough to live alone.”

  I looked in surprise from one to the other. Gusta’s face was as frosty as the tea glass on the table beside her. “This child,” she said with emphasis, “has taken the notion to move into her daddy’s house over on Liberty Street, since that creature—” She stopped.

  “Candi has left,” Meriwether finished smoothly. “She went back to New Orleans last evening. Daddy willed the house to me, and I’ve decided to live there.”

  “She has a perfectly good home right here. Why should she live in that poky little place—”

  “Built in eighteen ninety, charming, with three bedrooms and two baths. I told you, Nana, I’ve loved that house since I was in grade school. Daddy bought it originally for me and—” She stopped to take a breath, then turned to me. “He told me several years ago it would be mine one day.” Her eyes again sparkled with tears. “I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

  Gusta ignored both the tears and the interruption. “A poky little place,” she repeated, “way over there—”

  “It’s not in Macon, like you make it sound for heaven’s sake. It’s three blocks away.”

  “—and leave me to rattle around this house all by myself? Who is going to keep up with my stocks, pay all the bills, and enter checks into the ledger every month?”

  That last item could take some time. Gusta’s husband had been a fine upstanding gentleman in many ways, but he’d owned more run-down little properties across three counties than I liked to remember. He’d blocked Hope County from building public housing for years, saying loudly and at every opportunity, “We take care of our own. We don’t ask gov’ment for handouts.” The fact that most of his houses had leaky roofs and no insulation never came up.

  The first thing Joe Riddley said when he heard Lamar Wainwright was dead was, “Maybe we can finally get some decent public housing around here.”

  We did, but it never seemed to be enough. Gusta probably still got more than a hundred rent checks a month. Maybe two hundred. Little dribbles that swelled to a river by the time they reached her account.

  I came back to the conversation as Meriwether was saying, “I told you, Nana, you can hire somebody to do all that.”

  “Let somebody read my private correspondence? Keep my books? Write my checks? You know my arthritis is so bad I can scarcely hold a pen.”

  Meriwether gave an impatient little huff. “Other people deal with this.” She turned to me. “We even have a good candidate. A few weeks ago we got a letter from Nana’s college friend, Bitsy Herrill, over in Macon—”

  “Odd girl, Bitsy,” Gusta interrupted. “Smoked like a chimney, but never drank coffee or tea. Claimed it was bad for you.” She took a long swallow of her own tea to prove that wasn’t so. “Drank that grass stuff they call herbal tea. Didn’t do her a speck of good. She’s dying anyway.”

  Meriwether went on like she hadn’t heard. They were used to doing that with one another. “She owns a small chain of gift stores, but now she’s dying of lung cancer and wrote Nana that she’s got a girl working for her whom she’d really like to find a place for before she dies. Says the girl is real sweet and honest, good with old women”—she gave me a mischievous wink, knowing full well her grandmother could see it—“a little shy, but competent. She was asking Nana if we knew anybody who needed someone. We said we didn’t, but now that Daddy’s left me his house”—she took a deep breath to steady the wobble in her voice—“I’ve decided it’s time Nana gets somebody to replace me. I want to restore that house. I went through it this morning, and you wouldn’t believe what Candi did to it. She lowered the ceilings, replaced the dining room chandelier with track lighting, installed wall-to-wall carpeting over oak floors, painted the kitchen pink, put in dark rose cabinets, even put a mirror on one entire bedroom wall!”

  “Deplorable,” Gusta agreed, “but what could you expect? Garlon never had any taste after your mother died. At least he didn’t expect you to keep up his little hobby.”

  It took all my fortitude not to kick her in the shins. Garlon’s “little hobby” was a perfectly respectable lawn and garden tractor business. Garlon loved that business, and worked as hard at it as we work at Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery. Owning several huge cotton mills instead of one decent store didn’t make Gusta better than the rest of us.

  The whole town already knew that Garlon’s will stipulated that the business be sold on very generous terms to his manager, a nice young man who was likely to make a go of it, and proceeds from that sale were to go to Candi. But that wouldn’t matter to Meriwether. The rest of Garlon’s money and what was left of her mother’s now passed to her. After thirty-two years of depending on other people for every penny she spent on exquisite clothes, little silver Mercedes convertibles, and the kind of grooming most of us have neither the time nor money for, Meriwether could pay her own bills. No wonder Gusta was upset. The two of them glowered at each other across the porch.

  “Children have to leave home,” I reminded my old friend, “and this young woman from Macon sounds like she could use a job. Why don’t you at least talk to her? She could be very grateful.”

  I could almost hear Gusta’s thoughts. A grateful employee might be easier to order around than a thwarted granddaughter.

  “Go bri
ng the portable phone out here and call her,” she said grudgingly to Meriwether. “And you talk to her, Mac. You’re used to hiring people. You’ll know what to ask.”

  I didn’t know if that was a compliment or an insult.

  Apparently Bitsy had her office phone forwarded to her home, because a soft voice answered. “Alice Fulton. This is Miss Betsy Herrill’s residence.” She sounded soggy and sad, like she had a bad head cold.

  “This is Judge MacLaren Yarbrough,” I told her. “I’m calling for Augusta Wainwright, a friend of Bitsy Herrill’s. Is she there?”

  “No, ma’am.” Her voice grew even sadder. “Miss Bitsy died last night. I was over here trying to pick out something for them to bury her in.” She sniffed, then said as if trying to convince us both, “She’s finally at peace. And she didn’t suffer at the end. Please tell her friends that. I was going to call them later today, after all the”—she paused to sniff again—“arrangements have been made.”