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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

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BOOK: Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man?
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“Old skinflint,” Joe Riddley growled as she moved to other guests.
“Honey, try to be nice,” I begged.
“Spent my life being nice, and where did it ever get me? Time I spoke my mind.” Joe Riddley waved a piece of stuffed celery like a baton. I bent to wipe pimento cheese from Gusta’s thick Chinese rug and hoped she hadn’t seen him spill it.
I could tell it wasn’t any use sticking around for the music. If he didn’t take a mind to sing along, he’d talk and spoil the afternoon for everybody. As soon as he’d eaten his “flea sandwiches,” as he kept calling them, I went looking for Gusta to lie about how much we’d enjoyed being there and say he was getting tired and had to go.
I didn’t see Gusta, so settled for Meriwether, who was with Slade Rutherford in the dining room. They seemed to be enjoying one another’s company a good deal. I heard her laugh aloud as I approached them—a sound as seldom heard in Hopemore as a discouraging word back home on the range.
“I need to take Joe Riddley home.” I gestured toward his chair. “He’s having a bad day, and he’s going to bother everybody. Will you tell Gusta for me?”
“Let me help you get him to the car,” Slade offered at once. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he promised Meriwether. “Don’t go away.”
He pushed Joe Riddley out to the back porch and down the ramp installed after Lamar Wainwright had his first heart attack. Slade helped Joe Riddley into the car as gently as if he were his own daddy, and stowed the chair in the trunk for me. “Can you get that out when you get home, Judge? Want me to follow you home and help?”
“I’ll be all right,” I assured him. “You go back in and enjoy the music.”
White teeth flashed in his dark face. “I was sure enjoying the company, as I’m certain you noticed. May I ask you a question?” He leaned close to me and spoke softly. “Is Meriwether seeing somebody?”
I patted his arm. “Only Gusta. You’d be a vast improvement.”
He threw back his head and laughed, then shut my car door after me.
As I backed down the drive, Joe Riddley growled, “Man brays like a donkey.”
 
The next Wednesday evening about eleven, a deputy called to say he needed me down at the detention center for a hearing, and he was coming to get me. Joe Riddley used to drive, of course, but they were still treating me like Hopemore was a hotbed of crime and I wouldn’t be safe driving myself the two miles each way. On our way back we came down Liberty Street and I saw a big green Lexus in front of Meriwether’s house. “Looks like that newspaper fellow is making time with Meriwether,” the deputy said with a grin.
The next Saturday at the beauty parlor I heard that Slade had been over at Meriwether’s house several times that week “bugging Buck to death with suggestions for how things could be done better. He’s more finicky than Meriwether, even.”
That same evening Walker and his wife, Cindy, saw them at By Candlelight, our most exclusive restaurant, for dinner.
Sunday evening, Ridd and his wife, Martha, reported they were out at Dad’s Outdoor BarBeQue, a large barn with long tables and benches and the best barbeque in our part of Georgia.
“She was laughing,” Martha reported. “I can’t remember the last man I saw Meriwether laugh with.”
I could. Jed Blaine. But she hadn’t done much laughing with anybody since she’d moved back in with Gusta. She smiled, but happiness never reached her eyes.
“Were her eyes laughing?” I asked.
Ridd looked at me like I was crazy, but Martha looked thoughtful. “No, they weren’t.”
I sighed. “Oh, well. Give him time.”
But time was something they were not destined to have—not right away. When I saw Gusta at the Garden Club luncheon the following Tuesday, she announced, “We won’t be here for the A.A.U.W. meeting. I’ve decided to go to China. I haven’t been there for several years, and there’s a wonderful tour some Agnes Scott alumnae have put together. Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and several other places.”
“You won’t miss Joe Riddley’s party, will you?” If she did, I’d never forgive her.
“Of course not. We’ll be back more than a week before that.”
“We? Who’s going with you?”
“Meriwether will accompany me, as usual.”
“Not this time,” Meriwether corrected her, joining us. “I’ve got my house to work on. They’re about to finish the kitchen. Besides, Slade and I have been invited—”
Gusta lifted her chin. “There will be other invitations, my dear. Besides, you know what they say: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Meriwether lifted her own chin while I looked down at my piled-up plate and tried not to feel guilty. Mine was full of fats and starches, Meriwether’s full of lettuce, carrots, and other bunny food. “I am not going,” she declared, “and that is final. Take Alice.”
“I have every intention of taking Alice. But I want you, too. She’s not used to my ways.”
“What’s there to get used to?” Meriwether demanded. “All she has to do is obey you.”
Gusta ignored her supremely.
“You could do me a favor,” I told Gusta. “While you’re there, get a pretty tea set for me to give Maynard and Selena for their wedding, if he ever gets around to asking her. I’ve been wanting something real special for them, and they both like tea. You can either bring it back or send it back.” Maynard Spence had lived next door to us since he was born, and he and I had gotten real close that past summer. I’d even introduced him to Selena.
“I’ll see what I can find,” Gusta agreed. I wrote her a check on the spot, and our conversation turned to other things.
 
As it turned out, circumstances worked in Gusta’s favor. The hot water heater in Meriwether’s new house fell through a soft spot in the floor. As somebody said down at Phyllis’s Beauty Salon, “Faced with cold-water baths, Meriwether decided to go to China.”
“Wish somebody would give me that choice,” said somebody else. Trapped by running water, I couldn’t see who was talking.
“Okay, Mac, let’s get you rolled.” Phyllis turned off the water.
As she wrapped my head in a towel and I moved to her work station, I joked, “I’ll bet Buck loosened that water heater on purpose, to get her to go away and leave him in peace.”
She leaned real close and muttered, “He didn’t, but he said he might of if he’d thought of it. If she’ll go, Buck says he can be done by the time she gets back, but she wouldn’t even think of it until this happened—and until that new newspaper editor said he’d stop by every afternoon to check things out.”
“Does Meriwether like that? She’s pretty independent as a rule.”
“Buck says Slade always checks with her before he makes a suggestion. He’s sweet as pie to her, but gives orders to the men like it was his house.”
“Maybe it will be one day. I hear they’re seein’ a lot of each other.”
“What about that girl who’s come to help Miss Gusta?” somebody called from the other side of the long mirror. “Looks like she’d be scared to stay in that big house by herself.”
Finally I had a bit of news to contribute. “She’s going, too. They leave Wednesday.” Nobody asked how I knew. Information like that floats on the air in a small town, as untraceable as perfume in a crowded room. I probably heard it at the store, or maybe Martha told me.
“Lah-di-dah,” the woman next to me jeered. “That girl sure fell into a good position.”
“Honey”—Phyllis leaned over to look her straight in the mirror—“would you work for Miss Gusta, even for a trip to the Orient?”
“Not for a trip around the world five times.”
“She’s got a sick aunt to look after, too,” Phyllis continued. “Came in here to get her hair trimmed yesterday and said she had to run down to Jacksonville today to see her sick aunt before they leave.”
“How long’re they gonna be gone?” somebody called from the shampoo sink.
“Two weeks, I understand.” That was from behind the mirror again.
“Two weeks without Miss Gusta? How will Hopemore manage to survive?”
“Peacefully, probably.” Everybody tittered.
We didn’t know at the time that Hiram Blaine was giving notice that very day in Atlanta, planning to head back to Hopemore. Poor Hiram, even he had no idea of the trouble he’d bring back with him.
6
OCTOBER
One afternoon in the second week of October, I was working in our back office when Walker came in rubbing his palms together. “I can’t believe I fell for that old trick.”
Looking at Walker is like looking in a mirror. We have the same brown eyes, the same stocky build, and the same honey-brown hair, except Walker’s is beginning to show some gray and mine, thanks to Phyllis, is not. Busy with the payroll, I scarcely looked up. “What trick?”
He slumped into his daddy’s desk chair, still rubbing his palms. “Hiram Blaine is back, with that same old electric button he hides in his hand to shock folks with. Must have fresh batteries though.” He held out a palm as pink as boiled shrimp. “That thing nearly sent me to Mars.” As he settled into the chair, he added, “Speaking of space travel, Hiram said he’s come back home because Atlanta’s full of aliens and they’re as slippery as turkey turd.”
“You don’t have to quote him. Hiram’s got the foulest mouth in Georgia.”
“Good pun, Mama.” Walker flipped on Joe Riddley’s computer, then flexed his right hand again. “He’s still got that old Yarbrough’s hat Daddy gave him years ago, and the same obstreperous red parrot perched on his shoulder.”
“Old Joe?” I grinned even though Walker wasn’t looking. “Don’t forget that parrot was named for your daddy, son. Watch how you insult him.”
“Hiram sent you his love.” Walker spoke without turning around. “His exact words were, ‘Tell Mizzoner I’ll come by to see her soon’s I get time.’ ”
“Lucky me.”
The main reason Gusta had objected to Meriwether’s dating Jed was that while he himself was a very personable young man, he belonged to one of the most peculiar families in Hopemore. In the South, “peculiar” can mean anything from a tad eccentric to downright dangerous, and generally we tolerate peculiar folks unless they do bodily harm. But the Blaines came close to being intolerable.
They had been the despair of Hope County for nearly a century, a shiftless family always more willing to annoy people than to bathe. In our generation the family had finally dwindled to Hector, Hiram, and their younger sister, Helena. Their mother had been a schoolteacher before she gave it up to marry a charming smile and a shock of black curls. She wasn’t the first wife to discover the wrappings were better than the package.
Our family hadn’t had much to do with any of the Blaines until thirty years ago, when Helena came back from being a civilian worker at Warner Robbins Air Force Base during the Vietnam War. She brought a little boy and no explanation. Just showed up at our store one day with the baby, asking, “You all got any work I could do?”
Joe Riddley felt sorry for her and hired her to work at the counter, but she was helpless with a register. We tried her in several positions before he found she had a knack for growing flowers. She cared for all our bedding plants, and under her care they were gorgeous.
Hector was a shiftless skunk who tried to wheedle a loan from anybody he met. He was also convinced the Confederate treasury was buried on their family farm, and for years he’d been arguing with the bank about a loan, using that hypothetical treasury as collateral. He’d been sent to jail several times for minor crimes.
Most of his fifty years, Hiram had been the less disgusting of the two boys, wandering around with a big red parrot on his shoulder, playing practical jokes. Then a few years back, he took up with our neighbor Amos Pickens, who was convinced earth was in danger of imminent attack from outer space with Venus as the launching station. After Amos died, Hiram saw himself as Hopemore’s only informed citizen. He petitioned the county commission to order everybody to buy black-out curtains so telescopes on Venus couldn’t peer in our windows at night. When they refused, he begged them to magnetize an old steel building down by the railroad tracks to attract any space-ships that attempted to land. The commissioners pointed out that a magnet that size would attract trains, tracks, and every automobile in town, but Hiram didn’t give up.
One night he was caught by a police officer on top of the water tank with a five-gallon bucket of vinegar. He had three more buckets on the ground, and claimed that putting vinegar in the water was the only surefire way to stop spies the aliens already had among us. “Alien bodies cannot tolerate vinegar,” he explained. “They shrivel.”
I vividly remember the morning the indignant officer brought Joe Riddley the warrant. “Son,” Joe Riddley said, stroking his jaw with one long forefinger, “carrying a bucket of vinegar is not exactly possession of implements of a crime, and scratching that old water tank a little getting it up there is hardly criminal damage of property. You’re reaching a bit, aren’t you? Let me try to talk Hiram out of this foolishness.”
But Hiram was so determined about the need for that vinegar, and the commission was so irate, Joe Riddley finally concluded that sending Hiram to jail for six months might be the best thing for everybody. When Hiram got out of jail, he went up to Atlanta, where Jed was already practicing law. Joe Riddley always said Jed was the only good thing to come out of the Blaines in three generations. Hiram had been in Atlanta nearly four years.
BOOK: Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man?
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