An Angel to Die For (5 page)

“Mom got a phone call from Maggie last summer,” I said. “Sometime in July, I think, and for some reason Mom was under the impression Maggie was living alone, that she was trying to get her life back together. And maybe it was just hope and imagination, but I
think she got the idea Maggie was thinking of coming home.”

“She didn’t end up with that rough-looking man she ran off with, did she?” My aunt pulled off clunky shoes and made herself comfortable in the recliner.

I shook my head. “That didn’t last. I think this Sonny came along soon after, though. They were together for over a year.” I closed my eyes, tried to shut down my thoughts. If only Maggie had come home! A few days before my sister left, we’d had a terrible argument and I’d told her she was being selfish and rotten, tearing our family apart. “When are you going to grow up?” I said. “I think you must get some kind of weird satisfaction out of worrying Mom and Dad!”

What a first-class jerk I was! No wonder Maggie left home. I wished we could have talked once more, made our peace. But she was probably afraid our dad would throw her out. And I guess I didn’t give her much of an incentive either.

The people in the car behind them had said they couldn’t believe it when Sonny accelerated just as the train approached. Surely he hadn’t meant to kill himself and my sister as well!

When Aunt Zorah offered a glass of wine, I took her up on it. I could use a little help in getting to sleep that night.

Despite my aunt’s protests, I left after breakfast the next morning. (There’s not much you can do to screw up cold cereal.) And because I had to pass there on
the way home, I stopped at Simmons and Griggs Funeral Home to see if Clyde Simmons had heard about a body turning up in my uncle’s casket in our shed. Mr. Simmons was out, so I passed the information along to his partner, Harold Griggs, whose father, Maynard, had started the business, but was now semi-retired. To be honest, I didn’t see anything semi about it, as every time I passed there during warmer weather, the older Mr. Griggs was asleep in a rocking chair on the front porch. To get away from his wife, Aunt Zorah said. “If I were married to Ernestine Griggs, I’d stay away too. An Abercrombie before she married, you know. Came from money—which is probably why Maynard married her in the first place. Penny-pincher if there ever was one, and that’s not all he’s pinched!” My aunt had hinted old Mr. Griggs used to be bad about women. Again, likely because of that “cold fish” Ernestine. “Don’t ever give him a chance to be alone with you,” she cautioned. But I couldn’t imagine the old coot having a go at it with anybody! Today I found him napping on the sofa in the small back office and for a frozen second I thought he was a corpse lying there—until I heard a definite snore. His son and I whispered so we wouldn’t wake him.

“Sheriff Bonner told me about it,” the younger Griggs said, looking suitably despondent. “I hope they find whoever’s responsible soon.” He pumped my hand heartily, practicing, I supposed, for his upcoming political campaign for a seat on the state senate. “If we can
do anything, anything at all, you just let us know, you hear?” As I left, I realized he’d slipped a card in my hand promoting himself as a candidate.

I hurried home, hoping Augusta would still be there. I needed an angel “fix.” Turning into our driveway, I met our letter carrier, Suzie Wright, who was just leaving, and she stopped and rolled down her window to talk.

“Don’t want to alarm you, Prentice, but I saw a strange man walking down the road near here as I started out this morning. Acted kind of peculiar when he saw me watching him—cut back into the woods like he was trying to hide. After what’s been going on around here, I thought you ought to know.”

“It wasn’t Jasper Totherow, was it?”

“Lord no! I know that snake. This man had a beard, wore a cap—purple, with earflaps. Say, they haven’t found out any more, have they? About who that woman was, I mean?”

I told her she knew about as much as I did, and Suzie frowned. “Prentice, you really shouldn’t be out here by yourself. It’s just not safe with all this going on.”

I didn’t tell her about my heavenly companion, but did say the police had promised to keep an eye on the place. “I’ll call the sheriff right now and tell them what you saw. Could be just a hitchhiker passing through, but they’ll want to check it out.”

“I left a package on your back porch,” Suzie said. “I was kinda worried about leaving it there after seeing that man, but I guess it’ll be okay.”

I thanked her and waved as she drove away, meaning to call the sheriff as soon as I got home. They had promised to get somebody to haul away that gruesome coffin in the barn. I didn’t want it there any longer than it had to be, and bodies appearing and disappearing shook me up more than I cared to admit—Augusta or no Augusta.

But the package I found on the back porch made me forget everything else. It was postmarked from Athens, Tennessee, the town where Maggie died.

I
heard Augusta singing as soon as I stepped inside. The song was a favorite of hers, “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer.” She had learned it, she said, while on assignment during World War II. The silver-toned notes resounded from what used to be Maggie’s room upstairs, accompanied by some kind of whirring noise like a blender breaking the sound barrier.

The box was about the size of a computer terminal but it wasn’t heavy. With the package under my arm, I raced upstairs to find Augusta at my mother’s old sewing machine. Folds of vividly patterned cloth in red, green, yellow, and white swirled at her feet, and she turned and smiled when she saw me. “Hope you don’t mind, but I found this fabric in your mother’s sewing cabinet. It was labeled
kitchen curtain material
, so I
thought I’d zip them on up, add a little color around here.”

For a minute I stood and stared at the obstinate old sewing machine my mother had referred to as “Jaws” because it ate cloth by the yard and shredded the rest. Now it hummed along so smoothly it might be singing backup.

Augusta draped a sample from her arm for my inspection. “What do you think? I measured the windows, and there was enough for the breakfast room too.”

“Perfect,” I said. And of course they were. She had even lined them and scalloped the hems. “Mom was going to do something about those windows last fall, and then Dad died, and I guess she just didn’t care anymore.” I put the package on my sister’s cherry sleigh bed. “This just came in the mail from that town in Tennessee where Maggie was killed. I didn’t want to open it alone.”

Augusta snipped one last thread and folded the fruits of her labors, then sat on the bed beside me. “Then I guess there’s nothing for it but to look,” she said.

I tore apart the corrugated flaps to find a receipt listing the contents and a note from the police department there. They apologized for taking so long to return Maggie’s effects, but in cases of accidental death, they were required to hold a victim’s possessions until after an investigation. Which must mean the investigation was over and the police were satisfied with the outcome. I wasn’t.

The letter rested on top of a cheap brown plastic purse and a square bubble-wrapped bundle. I guessed what I was going to find as I peeled away the wrapping and lifted the lid of the box. My sister’s pearl ring, the one our parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday, lay inside. And next to it was the dainty gold wristwatch that had belonged to our grandmother. Maggie had always admired it, and Mom dangled it like a carrot to encourage my sister to graduate from high school. Maggie got her diploma and the watch just a few months before she roared out of our lives on the back of a Harley.

I picked up the watch and held it in the palm of my hand, remembering the day our mother presented it to Maggie. Mom had cried with pride, while Maggie, acting cool, pretended nonchalance. I slunk into the bathroom and pouted because I had wanted the watch for myself. Now it was mine—crushed crystal, broken catch and all. And it was my turn to cry. Again.

“I think there’s something in the handbag,” Augusta said, offering her ever-present hankie.

The purse was scuffed and dirty and one strap hung loose. I unzipped it to find my sister’s worn red billfold, a present from me the last Christmas she’d spent at home. Tucked inside were a ten-dollar bill, four ones, and fifty-eight cents in change. It also held Maggie’s driver’s license still in her maiden name; her eighteen-year-old face grinned at me from the plastic. That had been how the police knew to locate us after the accident.
I blotted my tears and stuffed the license back into its compartment. Mom mustn’t see this. Not now. Maybe not ever.

I was about to put it away when Augusta stayed my hand. “Wait. There’s a card or something.”

The corner of something white protruded from a crevice behind a folded coupon for diapers, and I slipped out a small wallet-sized photograph of a baby who looked to be about three months old. There was also a picture of my sister holding the same child, along with a small color snapshot of our parents in front of the Christmas tree.

Feeling almost guilty for invading my dead sister’s privacy, I reached again into the bottom of Maggie’s purse, and as soon as my fingers closed around it, I knew what it was. A baby’s pacifier!

I passed the pictures to Augusta. “It’s Maggie’s! I know it is. What a beautiful baby! What do you think? Boy or girl?” I spoke in a whisper because it seemed almost irreverent to use my normal voice after what we had discovered. My sister had had a child, and we would have a part of her once again. A new chance. I felt as if I had found a rosebush blooming in midwinter.

Augusta smiled. “Does it matter?”

It didn’t. However, since the baby in the photo was wearing blue, I assumed it was a little boy—at least until we found out otherwise.

But where was he? There had been no mention of a child involved in the wreck that killed Maggie and her husband. “We have to find him,” I said.

“What about her husband’s parents? Do you know how to locate them?”

“Maggie wasn’t living with Sonny Gaines when this happened. When Mom spoke with her last, she said something about not needing a man in her life.”

Augusta looked at the baby’s picture and smiled. “Seems as though she might’ve gotten one.”

“She must’ve been pregnant when she called home,” I said. “I wonder how old the baby is now.”

“There’s a possibility your sister’s husband didn’t know he had become a father,” Augusta said. “And if so, she must have had a reason to keep it from him.”

“I don’t even know where—or when—this baby was born,” I said. “Where do we start?”

Augusta let the long strand of beads shift through her fingers and I watched the colors change from indigo to dazzling purple. “Begin at the end, I think. The place where she died.”

“Athens,” I said. “It’s somewhere between Chattanooga and Knoxville.” I sat at Dad’s old roll-top desk in the upstairs hall and stared at the telephone. The telephone stared back.

“There must be a hospital there.” Augusta’s light touch on my shoulder seemed to clear my jumbled thoughts. Of course. I called directory assistance.

But the hospital in Athens couldn’t and wouldn’t give me the answers I wanted. They weren’t allowed to give out information on a patient, I was told. However, they could tell me the date of dismissal if I knew when my sister was admitted there. But of course I didn’t.

I examined the photograph again. “This looks like it’s been in her billfold for a while,” I said. “If he was three months old when this was made, he might have been born in the summer, or even before.”

Augusta nodded. “Before she came to Tennessee, you mean?”

“Or at least to the Athens area. The last card Mom got from Maggie was postmarked in some little town in Tennessee I’ve never heard of. Funny name . . . Three Oaks. I remember Mom calling there, trying to find her, but Maggie wasn’t listed. Probably didn’t even live there. My sister covered her tracks well—mailed things from different places so we couldn’t find her.” I thought of the hurt and disappointment in our mother’s face, and once again anger at Maggie flared like heartburn. How could she do this to people who loved her?

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to try. I asked the operator for the number of the hospital in that area, only to be told there wasn’t one. A spokesman in the mayor’s office in Three Oaks told me that most people there used the small hospital just over the Georgia line.

I felt as if I were trying to write a letter with alphabet blocks, but if I could just get one lead, it would be worth the effort.

The woman at the community hospital in Catoosa County repeated what I’d been told at the Athens facility: no information on a patient except for date of dismissal. “And when was your sister admitted?” she asked.

“Sometime in July, I think.” It was as good a guess as any.

“July.” Pause. “And her name?”

“Gaines,” I said. “Or probably Dobson. Maggie. Margaret Dobson.” If Maggie didn’t want her husband to know about the baby, she might have used her maiden name.

The woman sighed. I was ruining her day. “I’m sorry,” I said, although I wasn’t.

“I don’t see any record of either a Margaret Gaines or a Margaret Dobson as being a patient here in July,” she said.

“Try August then . . . please. I wish I could give you more to go on, but it really is important.” I tried not to sound as impatient as I felt; after all, she was doing me a favor.

“Just a minute. I’ll see.” The woman’s voice sounded more cordial, downright pleasant. Maybe it was Augusta’s influence as she was hovering over my shoulder.

“Right. Here it is. A Margaret Dobson was released from Community General last August seventeenth.”

“And the baby?” I held my breath.

“Ma’am, we can’t give out your sister’s reasons for being admitted.”

“I know, but this is different. Maggie was killed in an accident last month, and we don’t even know the baby’s name, much less where to find him.”

“Births are a matter of public record in the state of Georgia,” the woman said finally. “You might try the courthouse in Ringgold.”