Who Invited the Dead Man? Page 3

  “Honey, would you like me to call back another day? We wanted to talk about a possible job down here, but this doesn’t sound like a good time.”

  “Oh, no, ma’am, I can talk now if you like. It would take my mind off things.”

  When I asked about her business skills, she said, “I just did whatever Miss Bitsy told me to. I went to work for her to put myself through community college. But she was so nice, I quit school and worked for her full time. She taught me what I needed to know.” Her voice broke. “I’m sorry,” she explained through a series of sniffs, “but losing her is almost as hard as losing Mama two years ago. I’ve been with her seven years, and she was real easy to work for.”

  I doubted if she’d find Gusta easy to work for, but didn’t like to discourage her right off the bat. And what did it matter what skills she’d needed to work for Miss Herrill? Apparently she was used to following orders, which is the only skill she’d need at Gusta’s. Nobody who ever worked with or for Augusta Wainwright had need of initiative.

  “How soon do you think you could come?”

  She hesitated. “Do you think I could take a couple of weeks off first? I need to help them close up things here, and my sister has invited me to go scuba diving down in Clearwater. It sounds like a lot of fun, but if Mrs. Wainwright needs me right away—”

  She’d have time enough to cater to Gusta’s whims once she got to Hopemore. “I think you ought to take some time off between jobs, honey. It will refresh you.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I think it might. But I’ll come as soon as we get back. I know I’ll like it there. I prefer small towns.”

  Gusta reached for the phone. “This is Augusta Wainwright. The job isn’t much. A little typing, helping me with parties, entering checks into my ledger, and keeping me company, since I’ll be alone in the house.” She frowned at Meriwether.

  Meriwether and I shared a grin. “She makes slavery sound like a long vacation,” I said.

  Alice must have asked a question, because Gusta said, “No, I don’t have a computer. I do everything by hand. Can you do that?” Alice must have said she could, because Gusta said, “Fine, then, come whenever MacLaren—Judge Yarbrough— told you to. Now tell me about Bitsy.” She finally expressed proper regrets, ending, “She was a good friend to us all.”

  “She sounds like she’ll do fine, doesn’t she?” Meriwether asked a bit anxiously. “Nana can get so out of sorts with people.” “Out of sorts” was putting it mildly. Mean as a junkyard dog was more like it. I didn’t envy shy little Alice Fulton, but at least she’d have a job.

  As I stood to leave that afternoon, I felt real proud of myself. I’d helped the Wainwrights solve their little dilemma, and everything would be rosy in Hopemore.

  For a very short time.

  3

  As Meriwether walked me to the car, a navy blue Cadillac pulled up their drive, making a Cadillac sandwich with my Nissan as filling.

  Meriwether wrinkled her forehead. “I wonder what Pooh wants.”

  Winifred “Pooh” DuBose is Gusta’s oldest friend—born two months later—but Pooh is as sweet as Gusta is tart, and has a far greater claim to our local throne: She is a direct descendant of William Few, who signed the Declaration of Independence. Pooh’s husband, Lafayette DuBose, started with one truck and built a national trucking line, so she’s almost as rich as Gusta, too, but Gusta set Pooh straight about who was number one in their baby carriage days. Pooh doesn’t seem to mind. She doesn’t mind, either, that everybody, from the old to the very young, calls her Pooh. The only people in town who call her Miss Winifred are Otis Raeburn, her driver and general helper, and his wife, Lottie, Pooh’s housekeeper.

  Neither Gusta nor Pooh ever bought a car when their husbands were alive, so neither of them knew how to buy one after the men died. Gusta still drove Lamar’s 1980 model. Pooh’s was five years old. Otis polished them both and took them to be serviced or repaired.

  That morning Otis climbed stiffly out of Pooh’s Cadillac and, with immense dignity, hoisted a wheelchair from the trunk and rolled it to the back door.

  Otis is thin as a rail, and must be nearer eighty than seventy. He and Lottie were working for Pooh long before I got married. They had seen Pooh and Fayette through the birth of their only son, Zachary, through Zach’s death in Vietnam, and, most recently, through Fayette’s own death a couple of years ago. Now the wheelchair was almost too heavy for Otis’s thin wrists. I wondered how much longer he would be able to haul it in and out of that high trunk.

  He opened the door, and Pooh wriggled herself out, a small plump woman moving with arthritic difficulty. She could stand and even walk a few steps on her own, but barely, so she balanced against the car for a mere moment before lowering herself into the chair. Then she threw both hands up in delight. “I’m here!” A frame of silver curls surrounded round pink cheeks and sparkling eyes as light blue as the autumn sky. “I didn’t know you were coming, MacLaren. It’s so good to see you.”

  I gave her a hug and Meriwether bent to give her a kiss.

  Pooh gave her a worried frown. “I do hope Gusta remembered I don’t like canned asparagus. She’s had it the last two times I’ve been here.”

  Meriwether’s dark brows moved together in consternation. “Are you here for dinner?”

  Otis gently shook the handles of Pooh’s chair in reproach. “I tol’ ’er she wadn’t invited today. Tol’ and tol’ her. But she wouldn’ listen.”

  “Of course I’m invited.” Pooh’s hands fluttered in irritation. “Come Tuesday, Gusta said.”

  “That was last Tuesday, Miss Winifred,” Otis said in equal irritation. He turned to me. “I tol’ her twenty times she already had dinner here last Tuesday. But she won’t listen to nobody since Mr. Fayette died.” He slapped one bony thigh in frustration.

  Pooh turned and spoke over her shoulder with dignity. “Go on home. Gusta invited me herself. Meriwether will help me in. I’ll call you when I’m ready for you to come get me.”

  Meriwether threw me a look of appeal.

  “Why don’t you go check with Gusta, and let me visit with Pooh?” I suggested.

  She turned and hurried up the walk.

  Pooh cocked her head. “How is that dear Joe Riddley?”

  “He’s coming along, but he’s not real patient with his therapy.”

  I was about to invite her over to visit him when Meriwether loped back. “I am dreadfully sorry, Pooh, but Nana forgot all about inviting you, and we’re having leftovers. Canned asparagus, too. How about if you come next Tuesday? I’ll have something very special for you.”

  “No canned asparagus?” Pooh quavered.

  “No canned asparagus.” Meriwether gently turned the chair back toward the car so Pooh could climb in more easily. “Will you remind her, Otis?”

  “I’ll bring her,” Otis promised as he climbed back into the driver’s seat. “I surely will. Thank you, Meriwether. Very kind.”

  “Oh, well,” Pooh said almost to herself. “We’ll probably get home about the time Zachary gets back from the store.”

  The blue Cadillac inched down the driveway.

  Meriwether watched it creep down Oglethorpe past three houses and turn into the drive of Pooh’s large yellow Victorian. “I hate her getting like that. I just hate it!”

  “I do, too, honey, but at least she’s happy and sweet. And she’ll have forgotten lunch at Gusta’s by the time she gets up from her afternoon nap.”

  Instead, Pooh got up angry at crows.

  It wasn’t shots I heard, it was the siren tearing down Oglethorpe Street.

  Sirens are so unusual in Hopemore that I raised my head from the checks I was writing. With only thirteen thousand people in what the chamber of commerce proudly calls Greater Hopemore, any cause for alarm probably involves somebody I know. I feared a car accident on the other side of town, where folks hadn’t gotten used to a new four-way stop. When the siren’s wail stopped soon after it passed our store, though, I listened harde
r. It was just a matter of time before somebody came to tell me what was going on.

  Sure enough, my granddaughter Bethany—Ridd’s daughter—burst through the door. “You didn’t knock,” I reminded her for the hundredth time. Bethany, a high school junior, had started working afternoons after school to earn money for college. She was having a hard time remembering that my office door now belonged to her employer, not her grandmother.

  “Sorry.” She backed out breathlessly, knocked, and waited.

  “Come in. What’s going on out there?”

  “It’s Pooh. She’s in her backyard shooting!”

  My first instinct always is to think I have to get up and do something about any situation. Now that I don’t have Joe Riddley to remind me I don’t, I try to remember to remind myself. But before I sat back down, I asked, “Shooting what?”

  “A gun, Me-mama.”

  “I know that. I mean what is she shooting at?”

  “I don’t know. They just said shooting.” “They” being the Hopemore grapevine that gets news around so fast we scarcely need a newspaper at all. “Maybe at the police,” she added.

  That sent me out of my office in a hurry, toward the front sidewalk. Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery is on Oglethorpe one block west of the square. Pooh, like Gusta, lives one block east of the square. Hopemore is so old that our earliest first families built their homes in easy walking distance of their banks, businesses, and law offices.

  From the sidewalk we heard another shot.

  “What you reckon she’s shooting at?” one of my clerks asked.

  “Don’t know. It’s not huntin’ season,” a Yankee tourist replied. You’d have thought Hopemore was Alaska, with game roaming the streets.

  Just then, to my relief, the shots stopped.

  “Where would Miss Pooh even get a gun?” a young man asked near the front of the crowd.

  “Probably one of Mr. Fayette’s old ones,” said one of his contemporaries.

  “Pooh used to have guns of her own,” I informed them. “She was one of the best shots in the county. Hunted with Fayette for years, and brought back squirrels, rabbits, even a buck back in nineteen—” I stopped, remembering I was close to giving a clue to my own age. “I don’t remember the exact year.”

  A second siren wailed from another direction and a second cruiser pulled up to the curb down the street. We saw two officers jump out. One carried a bullhorn, the other had his hand on his pistol.

  Two more shots rang out. “She just stopped to reload,” a woman announced unnecessarily.

  The bullhorn bellowed indistinctly.

  Bethany turned to me. “Me-mama, go down there. You know how confused Pooh gets now’days. She might shoot somebody.” What sent me scurrying to my car instead was the fear that an overexcited officer might shoot Pooh.

  I drove a tad more quickly than a judge ought to, and was embarrassed at the screech my tires made on the gravel drive as I stopped. Before I could even get my door open I heard the bullhorn thunder. “Put down the weapon. Put it down.”

  I was shaking so hard I could hardly get the door open, and I must have set an Olympic record for women over sixty sprint ing up a long driveway. I found three young officers at Pooh’s back gate. One had the bullhorn and one actually had his weapon drawn.

  “Don’t shoot!” I yelled, puffing for breath. “Let me talk to her.”

  As they turned in surprise, Otis stepped from behind a big camellia bush. He was gray and shaking, sweat running from his temples. “I sure am glad to see you! Folks has gone plumb crazy ’round here.” He waved both hands in the air.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The officers replied in official jumble-ese, but Otis gave a clearer picture. “Miss Winifred got up from her nap, got in her power chair, and wheeled herself out in the yard with her shotgun before I knew she was awake. When I saw her through the kitchen window, I came right out after her, but she said she’s gonna kill those pesky crows that keep her from napping. I tried to talk her out of it—tol’ her and tol’ her you can’t shoot a gun in the city limits. But she was bound and determined.”

  Another shot was fired in the backyard and the bullhorn roared again. “Put down your weapon or you will be considered armed and dangerous.”

  Otis’s eyes widened in fear. “I called the po-lice thinkin’ they’d come talk sense to her. Instead, next thing I know we’ve got po-lice all over the place drawin’ their guns. We gotta get that gun away from her”—he gave the officers a rebuking glare—“but we don’t hafta shoot her to do it.”

  “Subject is armed and dangerous, Judge,” one of the officers informed me stiffly.

  I treated him as formally as he was treating me, although I’d lifted him up to water fountains when he was crawling around my shoelaces. “Let me see if I can talk to her, Officer.”

  I rounded the big camellia and saw Pooh sitting in her wheelchair in a lavender-and-blue cotton coffee coat with a wide white pique collar. She looked perfectly harmless except for the shotgun on her shoulder. As I watched, she aimed at the sky, pulled the trigger, and brought down a spiraling black form.

  “Good shot, Pooh! You haven’t lost your skill. But what’re you doin’?” I called from the gate. I started walking toward her like I was just curious.

  She lowered the gun and turned in her chair, swinging the barrels in my direction. I saw that her arms were shaking from the exertion of holding the gun. And while she could still remember how to shoot, she apparently couldn’t remember not to aim a loaded gun at friends. That was one of those times I wished I was someplace else, especially since the young officer behind me probably had a protective but trembling finger on his own trigger at my back.

  Pooh’s face was flushed with heat. “Why, hello, MacLaren!” We could have been at a garden club party except for the gun pointed at my chest. “I’ll be with you in just a minute. First I have to shoot the rest of these pesky crows. They’ve taken up residence in my magnolia and simply won’t let me get my nap.”

  She turned back to aim toward the towering magnolia that stood between her yard and her neighbor’s. Just beyond that particular tree was her neighbor’s kitchen window.

  I considered trying to dissuade her, but knew that wouldn’t work. “Can you get a clear shot from your chair? Looks like you’ve got a branch between you and the crow.” I walked closer to her and bent down to sight over her shoulder.

  “Get the gun!” one of the officers called.

  I ignored him.

  Pooh nodded seriously. “That’s what I’ve found.” She started to move awkwardly, waving the gun about. “If I get up, will you hold me so I can stand?”

  “Maybe I ought to shoot the crows.”

  I could tell the officers were having fits behind me. I flapped one hand behind my back to keep them from rushing us both.

  Pooh’s forehead puckered like she was thinking it over. “Are you a good shot, MacLaren? I don’t rightly remember.”

  “Used to shoot rats in Daddy’s henhouse, and never hit a chicken.”

  She thought about that while the courthouse clock chimed four. Then she gave me her sunny smile and held out the shotgun. “That ought to be all right, then.”

  I took it and sighted along the barrel, wondering how long it would be before those young policemen’s patience ran out. “You know, I can’t get a clear shot, either. I’m likely to shoot right through your neighbor’s downstairs window. I sure don’t want to rile anybody, do you?”

  “Well, no, I don’t want to upset the neighbors. But we’ve got to get rid of those crows.”

  I lowered the gun’s muzzle to the grass. “You know what? We’ve got some artificial owls down at the store that will scare them off. How about if I send somebody over with some? He’ll even install them for you.”

  “That would be wonderful!” Pooh clapped her hands in delight. “I should have called you in the first place.”

  “I wish you had. I’ll send one of our men down
within the hour. Okay?”

  “That will be fine. Otis? Where’s Otis? That man is never around when I need him.”

  “Here I am, Miss Winifred.” He came through the gate and took the handle grips of her chair. “Let me get you inside so you can get dressed for the afternoon.”

  Pooh looked down in surprise. “Why, MacLaren, I am ashamed to have you see me like this. I came out in such a hurry, I forgot to put on my dress.” She put her chair in gear and started up the ramp to her back porch.