An Angel to Die For (10 page)

On my way inside I was almost knocked sideways
by Maynard Griggs, the elder of the funeral home Griggses, who came scurrying out with an armload of books.

“Oh, my goodness, I beg your pardon,” he huffed as a thick volume slid to the sidewalk.

“That’s all right.” I tried to regain my breath and my composure as I stooped to pick up a copy of A
Collection of Works by Charles Dickens
.

“My granddaughter’s writing a term paper,” he said, hurrying away. I smiled. I didn’t know the man was capable of moving that fast.

Aunt Zorah gave me the evil eye from her desk on high. “Well, I see you’re still with us. Can’t say I’m not surprised with all the goings-on out there. What do you suppose these people are after? You don’t have hidden treasure you haven’t told me about, do you?”

“If we do, it’s hidden from me,” I said. “And I’d probably be safer at home than here. Mr. Griggs just about bowled me over out there with all that literature he’s lugging around.”

Aunt Zorah made a face. “Spoils that Cynthia rotten! And that snobby Ernestine’s just as bad, if not worse. Spent all that money to send that girl to prep school, and what does she do? Flunks out before the term’s half over! What is she now? Sixteen? Seventeen? Old enough to go to the library on her own.” She snorted. “It doesn’t help a child to do too much for them. She’ll pay for it in the long run.”

I thought of the papier-mâché hand puppet Mom sculpted for Maggie’s book report in the fourth grade,
the excuses she made for her poor grades. Maybe Aunt Zorah had a point.

“I don’t guess you’ve heard any more about what happened to Uncle Faris,” I said, hesitating to bring up the subject.

My aunt obviously couldn’t restrain a sneer at Becky Tinsley’s selection of romances but checked them out anyway. “I don’t think the sheriff and his gang know how to put on their drawers in the morning,” she said aside to me. “Don’t have a lead, they say. Why anybody would want to dig up a corpse is beyond me, and they don’t seem to have a clue about that poor woman they found! That Fool Faris wasn’t any good when he was alive, and he sure isn’t going to win any prizes dead.”

“They mentioned something about a cult, some teenagers—”

She shook her head. “Didn’t find out anything there, but I don’t think that’s who did it. And frankly, neither does the sheriff.”

For all her blustering, I noticed my aunt’s lip trembling, and when she said his name,
That Fool
came out a little softer than usual. Aunt Zorah never stopped loving Faris Haskell, and you can take that to the bank!

When I got home, I found Augusta gathering armfuls of sunshiny forsythia and bright coral quince. One pinkish blossom tilted over a dainty ear, and the necklace trailed against her breast like a string of violet stars. She looked like a perfume ad in a pale fluted chemise with a rose-splashed overlay of sheerest gossamer that flowed behind her when she walked. Augusta
wouldn’t fit today’s idea of a model. There was a roundness to her arms, and her shoulders weren’t even close to being bony, but her goodness made her beautiful, and her clothing seemed to have been cut from a bolt of cloth that was part sea and part sky.

After a season of cold and rain, the day was warm and sunny, and since the house had strong new locks, we decided to take some of the flowers to Maggie’s and my father’s graves. I changed into boots and a sweater, and off we went across the dried winter grass and around the wooded hill where new leaves budded. I could smell spring, feel it, not only in the flowers we carried, but in the awakening earth itself. There was hope for my mother, hope for me, and its name was Joey. It made me want to sing. So I did. It was a song I’d learned long ago in grade school:
Welcome sweet springtime, we greet thee in song . . .
and Augusta with her (sometimes) soulful voice joined in.

The gaping rectangle where Uncle Faris had been was still there. Uncle Faris himself, if we ever got him back, would be reburied in higher ground, and the new road would slash the gentle hillside below where he once lay. Already bulldozers waited to peel back the earth in readiness for the new homes to march in ordered lines where my granddaddy planted corn. The developers had promised to rebuild that part of the stone wall at the bottom of the old family graveyard. Even the dead deserve privacy, and I don’t guess the new home owners wanted to be reminded of the fate that awaits us all.

I mixed daffodils with the other blossoms and found the fruit jars we kept there for that purpose, but first I had to get water from the creek. Even though the day was mild, the brown water rushed cold and deep and I walked along the banks looking for a gradual slope where I could reach it without slipping.

Augusta trailed along in her own time, laughing at a family of rabbits, admiring a squirrel’s nest high in a sycamore tree. When we reached the old homestead, she stayed behind to run her fingers over the moss-covered stones, examine the pit that was the root cellar, touch lightly the place where the fireplace had been. She had lived in such a house, she said, and it made her think of the people there.

“Do you miss them?” I asked. “Will you think of me when you go?”

Augusta smiled. “I’ll carry you in my heart.”

But I could see she wanted to stay behind, and so I left her there. There was plenty of daylight left, the sun felt warm on my face and I must have walked for a half mile or more. If it had been warmer, I would have taken off my shoes and waded to dip up water, but today I was careful not to get my feet wet. I had started back to the cemetery, a dripping jar in each hand, when something caught my eye about halfway through the trees on the side of a hill. I set down the jars and moved closer. Fresh red dirt was mounded beside a crude trench.
Oh, Lord, please don’t let me find Uncle Faris here!
I was afraid to look and afraid not to. For all I knew, whoever dug this thing might still be around. I
stepped forward to take a quick look when a crow cawed with his loud sore throat voice from a limb above me and scared me clean into next week.

I turned and ran, crashing through the underbrush like a frightened animal, and raced across the pasture to the old homestead where Augusta sat quietly on the hearthstone. The trench had been empty, but I knew it was waiting for somebody.

I
guess you’re thinking you might as well set up camp here,” I said to Donald Weber when he came out to look at our latest mysterious hole in the ground.

“You’re not far from right, because that’s kind of what I had in mind,” he said. “We’ve tried to keep an eye on your place, but this is so far from the house, they could have a square dance out here and nobody would see it. Hear it either. Of course whoever’s doing all this digging knows that. Tonight, by golly, we’ll come in the back way and see what happens.”

“You mean like a stakeout?” I asked.

“I guess you could call it that.” We stood back from the trench because the area was trampled with footprints and we didn’t want to disturb them by adding ours. Sergeant Sloan leaned over to look into the oblong
hole. “Maybe somebody’s planning to bury an animal. Big dog or something. Know of any neighbors who’ve lost a pet?”

I shook my head. “If they had, they’d bury it on their own property. I think whoever dug this means to put a person here.” Probably Uncle Faris—or what was left of him, I thought.

“Looks like there were two of them.” The deputy pointed out two distinct sets of prints—one a little larger than the other. “And I suspect at least one of them borrowed your bathtub the other night. A lot of red mud, Sheriff Bonner tells me.”

The idea of it made me feel like somebody had tied a string to my backbone and jerked me inside out. I immediately thought of Jasper. “Ralphine Totherow used to do some cleaning for us,” I said. “Mom could’ve given her a key.”

But Sergeant Sloan shook his head. “Already checked on that. She says not. She did tell us that Jasper has been after her for money. Found him sittin’ on her doorstep yesterday; said he was broke and hungry and didn’t have anywhere to go.”

So the elusive Jasper had turned up at last! I could have told him where to go, and I hoped Ralphine did. “What did she do?” I asked.

The sergeant grinned. “Gave him a box of crackers and some peanut butter and sent him on his way.”

I frowned. “Where is he now? Did you get a chance to question him?”

“Ralphine called us as soon as he left, but the son
of a gun seems to have disappeared altogether. His wife thinks he was on the run, said somebody was after him.”

“He was telling the truth that time,” Deputy Weber said. “That man has more hidey-holes than a rabbit.”

“Or a snake,” I said.

“Some of the sheriff’s men are going to be watching that back part of the property tonight to see if the grave diggers return,” I told Augusta later. “I hope they clear up all this mess before Mom learns about it. We’ve been lucky so far she hasn’t seen it in the papers.”

Augusta nodded but didn’t answer because she was standing on a chair hanging curtains in the kitchen. Already the room looked transformed. Mom would be pleased if she ever came back home. But I doubted if she would. Of course she’d never be able to find anything because Augusta had put a lot of her cooking utensils in all the wrong places. I found Mom’s egg-shaped timer in the refrigerator and those little plastic things you stick in the ends of corn on the cob were pinning up grocery lists on the kitchen bulletin board.

Funny. It couldn’t have been five minutes before my mother phoned to ask if I was all right. “I’ve had you on my mind all day and just wanted to hear your voice. Is everything okay? How’s it going with the job hunting?”

“I’m working on that,” I said. How could I admit I hadn’t even updated my résumé? How I wanted to tell
her about Joey! But there were too many “ifs” to get into that just yet. I looked forward to putting that baby in my mother’s arms, bringing feeling back into her heart. And to seeing her eyes come to life when I did it.

“By the way, I had the locks changed,” I told her. “I’ll send you a key.”

“Why did you do that? Prentice, is something the matter out there?”

Thanks heavens Mom rarely watched television, and newspapers would collect for days before she’d get around to reading them. “Of course not,” I lied, “but I didn’t know how many people had keys, and it kind of made me uneasy.”

“Besides the two of us, I can’t think of anybody but Be-trice and Zorah,” she said. “And there’s that extra one in the garage.”

“Where in the garage?” I hadn’t thought about that.

“Your dad kept one hanging under a shelf just to the right of the door. Never carried a house key. Said he was afraid he’d lose it.”

I had lived with my parents eighteen years before I went away to college, and I never knew that about my father. We had been like strangers to each other since Maggie rode out of our lives. I wondered how many other things I never took time to know.

“So Ralphine never had one?” I asked.

“Heavens no!” My mother laughed. “Not that I’d object to giving her one, but I wouldn’t want that Jasper getting his hands on it.”

My mother paused, and I knew something was up other than my welfare. “Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again.

“Mom, I’m fine. Really. What is it?”

“You’re not still upset with me about leaving? About what happened between you and Rob?”

“You mean what
didn’t
happen?”

“Oh, dear! You are upset. Prentice, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. Would it make you feel better if I came back home?”

“No! No, it wouldn’t. Please don’t!” I realized I really didn’t want my mother to come home. But I did want her to make the offer. “I think it’s good for you to be away, for a while at least. And I guess I need to work out some things on my own too.” The fact that I had a bit of heavenly help would have to be my secret.

I could hear relief in her breathing. “Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that! Elaine has persuaded me to take a little cruise, says a vacation would do me good. Your father and I never really went anywhere, you know, and now that I’ve sold the property, I can afford to travel once in a while.”

“That’s good, Mom. Sounds wonderful, and you deserve it. Where will you be going? When?”

My mother would be leaving in a couple of days for a ten-day cruise in Alaska, she said. I surprised myself by wishing her bon voyage and meaning it. Must be Augusta’s influence.

“By the way,” I said, “you do have the pearls, don’t you?”

“Pearls?”

“Your grandmother’s pearls. Mom, please tell me you have them! They’re not in the box.”

“Oh. The pearls. Well, of course, don’t worry about that. Now, honey, I must run. My four o’clock piano student’s here—”

I wondered why my mother would take the pearls and leave the other keepsakes behind, but at least that sneaky Jasper Totherow hadn’t gotten his filthy hands on them. While it was still light I went to the garage to see if Dad’s key was still there. I found the nail where he had kept it beneath the shelf by the door, but the door key wasn’t there. I felt the shelf to be sure, checked the floor underneath . . . nothing!