Doing It at the Dixie Dew (2 page)

“Maybe she's one of those toast-and-tea people,” I said, thinking of Miss Lavinia, and mentally chided myself for not asking when she checked in. I was learning.

“Pepto-Bismol,” Ida Plum said, folding another freshly ironed sheet into a neat pink package. “That's the color of these sheets.”

“I'm going to overlook that remark,” I teased, and emptied the coffee into the percolator. “At my stage of the game, I can't afford to look sale horses in the mouth.”

“PB pink is still PB pink in my book.”

“Look at them this way,” I said. “Those sheets are four-eighty-count, pima cotton. They don't have rosebuds or poppies or apples or cherries and they were cheap. El cheapo. Bargain with a great big
B.
” Besides, I'd bought two dozen of them. Some for the beds and some to make tablecloths for the sunporch, which I was going to turn into a tearoom. Something Mama Alice always talked about but never did. Who in Littleboro would come to tea? There was a book club or two and there had always been the Littleboro Women's Club and Junior Women's Club, but most of those met only once a month. Bridge groups? Lions Club? Somehow I couldn't see many men eating at a table covered in pink pima cotton.

“Think I ought to go tap on Miss Lavinia's door? See if she's all right?” I headed down the hall and had my hand on the newel post when I saw a shadow through the leaded-glass front door. Black. A man wearing black: black suit, black shirt and a white clerical collar. Below it swung a large silver cross on a chain. Father Joe Roderick. “What a bod,” I said to Mama Alice the first time I saw him. “He's too good-looking to be a priest. It's a shame the church got him first. What a waste.”

Father Roderick had reddish hair and enough freckles for three faces. He also had the firm and ready handshake of someone going to go fast and far in church circles. “Joe Roderick,” he said when I opened the door. “St. Ann's.”

As if I didn't know. St. Ann's was the smallest church in town and the only Catholic one; blue stone, copper steeple, it sat on the corner of Main and Second. I went with Mama Alice when I was home, which wasn't often or much. The congregation had been the same handful, with a wide gap between those in blue jeans and T-shirts and the older, more moneyed members in suits and ties, the women in pastel crepe dresses overlaid with chunky gold jewelry. The real kind. Miss Tempie Merritt still tortured the asthmatic old organ. She tormented it like she whacked the fingers of her piano pupils. I wondered if she wiped off the organ keys with alcohol after each service like she did her piano at home when each pupil left. Weird woman. I'd known her all my life and she was just plain weird. The really weird thing was, as badly as she played, she kept on playing year after year after year.

Before today I'd seen Father Joe in tennis whites much more often than his working black. He played tennis on the high school courts and cut across the track field and several vacant lots to Main. “That charm and those legs will get him places with the church and all the blue-haired ladies in this town who clip coupons and sit on their CDs,” I said to Mama Alice. “He'll honey talk them into leaving every cent they've saved to the church. All he has to do is smile those sparkling whites and hug them often and they'll melt millions.” I wasn't worried about Mama Alice. Somehow she never seemed to get old and she certainly was no fool. Especially where money was concerned. She'd had to work too hard for what little she had. Sometimes she and I had sat in the front porch swing and watched Father Roderick dash home in time to change. He probably ended up saying Mass still damp from his shower.

Now Father Roderick, looking slightly damp from the April drizzle, stood on my front porch and handed me a gray suede handbag. “Beth, I think this belongs to your guest Miss Lovingood.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“Miss Lavinia had tea with me yesterday and forgot her handbag. My housekeeper only found it this morning cleaning my study. Would you be kind enough to give it to her with my apologies for not returning it sooner?”

“I'd be glad to,” I said, though I was sure she had not been concerned enough to let it disturb her sleep. It did give me an excuse to knock on her door. I watched Father Joe Roderick walk away. I thought, What's a good-looking guy doing at such a going-nowhere little church?

When Miss Lavinia checked in yesterday I thought she looked exactly like her handwriting. That precise cursive. Of the old school, Mama Alice would have said, when cursive was as important as needlework and tatting, who you married, where you went and who you were seen with. Miss Lavinia wore a gray suit of some soft leather that almost glowed, a lace blouse, gloves, stockings and the most beautiful, gleaming gray shoes.

“I'm Lavinia,” she said, and extended her hand. “You must be Alice's granddaughter Beth. I do hope my room is ready.” She signed the guest book, still wearing the largest, darkest sunglasses I'd ever seen. Bigger than those Jackie O. used to sport.

I took the pen and led Miss Lavinia upstairs. She climbed the stairs slowly, delicately, her hand barely resting on the rail as she went. She's like an aged movie star, I thought, someone very well kept, marvelously preserved, but fragile as the thinnest crystal.

At the top of the stairs Miss Lavinia nodded like I was about to be dismissed and said, “I've had a difficult day.” She drew in the corners of her pale mouth. “Not unpleasant. Just difficult.”

“Let me know if I can do anything to make you more comfortable,” I said.

She turned then and said she sometimes had trouble sleeping and often got up during the night to read or write letters. “Don't be alarmed,” she said, “if you see my light at some unusual hour or hear me moving about.” She seemed almost amused to be explaining herself.

“Okay,” I said now to Ida Plum as I geared up to go knock on Miss Lavania's door. “And I bet you anything her suit was made of eel skin. But it would take too many eels, wouldn't it?”

“You're asking me?” Ida Plum said. “I wouldn't know an eel if it bit me on the nose. All I know is if it cost a lot, and she's wearing it, that's probably what it is. She always had everything she wanted. Those Lovingoods lived like royalty even when they lived in Littleboro.”

“That mansion,” I said, remembering the wedding cake of a house that presided on the block behind the courthouse. For years it sat empty, never sold or rented. Miss Lavinia must have kept the taxes paid from wherever she was. Every year it fell down more and there were always the stories of how haunted it was and kids daring each other to go in, spend the night, et cetera. It finally got so covered with kudzu the garden clubs petitioned to have it torn down. That was about the time the county ran out of office space in the courthouse, bought the lot and built the annex, a redbrick building with skylights and a fountain in the courtyard that taxpayers still grumbled about being a waste.

“Do you know if she ever came back over the years?”

“She may have kept in touch with certain ones. I wasn't in that crowd. She's your grandmother's generation.”

“Here I go,” I said. “It's almost noon. Surely she won't be upset if I wake her now.”

The upstairs hall was so quiet I even found myself tiptoeing though nobody was in the other three bedrooms.

I tapped lightly on the door and called, “Miss Lavinia!”

There wasn't a sound. Not even a soft snore or a little cough. Everything was too quiet.

Ida Plum came up the stairs, arms full of sheets for the linen closet. “Maybe she's hard of hearing. Did you knock hard enough?”

I knocked again, hard and loud. The old door thumped and rattled. My fist actually ached, I'd knocked so hard.

Still no answer. No sound of movement inside. Nothing.

I knocked, called, knocked again.

Ida Plum nudged me aside and inserted the master key from its nail in the linen closet.

Miss Lavinia wasn't in bed. The room seemed to be empty. I noticed the window was open and my new lace curtains getting damp from the blowing rain. I ran to close the window and almost tripped over Miss Lavinia. She lay in a twisted lump of pink satin between the bed and the white wicker desk, one arm under and one arm out, a piece of paper nearby. The bouquet of lilacs, white tulips and Mama Alice's parsley I'd used for greenery was overturned and scattered across the floor. Miss Lavinia's satin slippers stood beside the bed and her matching robe lay across a chair. Her book and glasses were on the bedside table.

I touched her shoulder, a shoulder so cold I felt it through the fabric. “Oh.” I pulled back.

Ida Plum reached around me, took Miss Lavinia's lace-covered wrist and felt for a pulse. “None,” she said. “Better call nine-one-one. They'll get Eikenberry's.”

The funeral home? Oh God, I thought, Oh … my … God.

“The phone.” Ida Plum put both hands on my shoulders, turned me around and marched me from the room, aimed me toward the stairs. Then she closed Miss Lavinia's bedroom door, locked it tight, but not before I'd grabbed the piece of paper off the floor and shoved it in my pocket. I had even started to pick up the flowers before Ida Plum pulled me away. Some things you just do without thinking. It's like automatic pilot takes over. Then someone reminds you where you are and what has happened.

In the end, Ida Plum was the one to call 9ll. I stood in the kitchen shivering like a New England winter.

I pulled the paper from my pocket and read two words scribbled in Miss Lavinia's handwriting scrawled haphazardly across the page. “That is…” That is what? I asked. What?

I heard the MedAlert leave the fire station, wailing. The wailing got closer and louder and my grandmother's expression “loud enough to wake the dead” kept playing in my mind.

Except nothing would ever wake Miss Lavinia again.

Chapter Two

“This town loves a funeral,” I said. In the years I'd been away I'd forgotten exactly how much a funeral was an occasion in Littleboro. The funeral home, where the “viewing” took place, was a social gathering and the line of cars down Main Street was a status symbol. “Cars were parked clear down to the schoolhouse,” or, “Honey, I stood in line for over an hour. I've never seen such a crowd,” people said at the beauty shop and grocery store. Somehow I couldn't quite see that sort of picture for Miss Lavinia Lovingood. It was hard to imagine who would be at her viewing or funeral.

My grandmother, Margaret Alice McKenzie, who raised me, used to say this town went all out for a funeral. Every weekend come pouring rain, blasting sunshine or icy-fingered sleet, there's somebody out on the bypass selling artificial funeral wreaths. Wreaths with every color flower nature never made and ribbons that accuse or get to your guilt with sayings like “Remember Mama” or “Daddy, Gone but Not Forgotten” or “We Love You, Grandpa.” I try to look the other way as I drive by, though there's not a ribbon that spells out my sins or advertises my guilt. Not one “Welcome Home, Prodigal Daughter” in the bunch.

Ida Plum laid a stack of sheets on the kitchen counter, cotton sheets, line dried, ironed. They smelled smooth and old-fashioned and as if somebody cared, a sweet-smelling bed. Had Miss Lavinia even noticed? Had it been a quick death? I felt a little chill remembering and wrapped my arms around myself.

“Would you look at all the cakes?” Scott stood at my kitchen table. “There's six layer cakes and two pound cakes.” He counted like a child eyeing a picnic. Scott had become, by default, my contractor/go-to guy/general-knowledge person about restoring an ailing house. He had come to my rescue just as I was about to give up, give in and go. Go where? Anywhere but here.

When I first started on the Dixie Dew, I'd hired Jake Renfroe, somebody Verna Crowell from next door had said was “good.” Later I remembered Verna Crowell had said this with a giggle and her hand half over her mouth. Good at what? I should have asked her. Good at sending me faster toward rack and ruin?

Jake Renfroe would order materials that piled up on my porch and then not show up to do anything with them. Meanwhile, bills kept coming in for all he'd charged in my name. Finally I picked up the phone and fired him. He'd cried. It's hard to hear an old man blubber over the phone, but I held firm.

Then Ida Plum said call Scott Smith. I did. He came and we'd been working together ever since.

Now Scott stood here in my kitchen eyeing the cakes under various wraps and foils as if they were trophies. Verna rang the back bell at six this morning, carrot cake in hand. “I'm so sorry to hear about Lavinia. Such a loss,” she said.

Verna lived in two rooms in a fifteen-room house that decayed more every day. Her house was a few years older than Mama Alice's and until the last ten years had been kept freshly painted and in good repair. The Crowells had money, but Verna wasn't about to spend it on heat in the winter or air-conditioning in the summer or paint and plaster and repairs. She was probably one of those “little old ladies” whom Father Roderick's charm was wooing out of all they had.

I didn't know what to say. I'd never met Miss Lavinia Lovingood before she decided to come to this house and die. Miss Lovingood had looked so awful when Ida Plum and I found her, all doubled over, her hair in a tangle and her face frozen in such agony. And so cold. I got goose bumps every time I thought about it.

“Lavinia Lovingood and I were girls together,” Verna said, then added before I could begin to count, “even if she was a good deal older. Of course we hadn't kept in touch. Not for years. Not until she wrote me.”

“Wrote you?”

“About a month ago.” Verna reached down and pinched off a dead tulip bloom. “You keep a bulb groomed and they'll last longer.”

“I don't understand.” I felt like putting out my hand to stop any more tulip molesting.