Guess Who's Coming to Die? (12 page)
Read Guess Who's Coming to Die? Online
Authors: Patricia Sprinkle
I had no idea. Gusta had insisted that Cindy, Meriwether, and I sit with her in the third row. I hadn’t looked to see who was sitting behind us.
I was cheered by having something to do besides sit and wait for Charlie to notice that Cindy was gone. I carefully put the list in my pocketbook where Joe Riddley wouldn’t see it and went to see what our cook, Clarinda, had left for supper. First thing tomorrow, I’d start working down my list. Surely I would find something to clear Cindy.
10
Mama used to say as we dressed for our annual trip to Atlanta’s smartest stores, “Gussy yourself up to intimidate them, honey, before they try to intimidate you.” So although I hadn’t slept at all well Wednesday night because of worrying about Walker and Cindy, I got up Thursday morning and dressed with Dexter Baxter in mind. Dexter was a snob. He strutted around Hopemore like cleaning toilets and mopping floors at the Hopemore Community Center elevated him far above folks who cleaned toilets and mopped floors in houses or offices, and he was never happier than when there was a formal do at the center and somebody rented him a tux to wear while helping the caterers.
For talking to Dexter, therefore, I put on my most expensive cream-and-green linen two-piece dress with my priciest bone pumps. I changed from my big carryall pocketbook to a small bone clutch Cindy had bought me for Christmas, because I’d heard that Dexter rated women by the maker of their shoes and purse. Halfway through breakfast Joe Riddley summoned the energy to lift his eyes from the newspaper. “You got a date for lunch? Ted Turner, maybe? Donald Trump?”
That man can go three weeks without noticing what I’ve got on, and then the one morning I don’t want him to pay any attention, he does. I’d figured he might, so I had an answer ready.
“I’m taking Wilma a casserole, so I want to look nice.” Please note that I told the absolute truth. I already had a frozen casserole in my car. If I also had a bag of frozen blueberry muffins to take to Dexter first, why mention it? Joe Riddley is all the time grumbling, “Tell it shorter, Little Bit. We don’t need every detail.”
We drove into work together in my Nissan, but as soon as Joe Riddley took one of the company trucks and headed down to the nursery, I picked up my clutch purse and went out to tell Evelyn, “I’m running a casserole over to poor Wilma Kenan.”
As I had hoped, Evelyn was so sympathetic she didn’t bother to ask when I’d return. But as I started out the door, the telephone rang and she called me back. “The sheriff for you.”
Buster (christened Bailey) Gibbons and Joe Riddley had been best friends since kindergarten. He was best man at our wedding, and if anything had happened to Joe Riddley and me while our boys were minors, they’d have been raised by that sweet old bachelor. Still, when Buster and I spoke officially, we were formal.
“Judge?”
“Hello, Sheriff. How’re you doin’ this fine day?”
“I’m doing tolerably well for an old geezer, but I thought you’d want to know that we’ve detained Nancy Jensen. Judge Stedley was on the premises and held the hearing, but Nancy’s asking to see you.”
My heart fluttered with hope. Nancy is a sweet, competent woman whom I have enjoyed working with on several committees, but if she had been charged with Willena’s murder, then Cindy was no longer a suspect.
“What’s the charge?” I asked.
“Attempted murder.”
Attempted?
The only murder I knew about recently had succeeded.
I decided to postpone my visits with Dexter and Wilma until after I had stopped by the detention center to find out what was what.
Poor Nancy looked like a squash in the orange prison jumpsuit—an impression enhanced by her narrow shoulders and wide bottom and the green walls of the interview room. A new hairstyle she’d gotten while I was on vacation was an improvement over the lacquered bob she’d worn as long as I’d known her. I had always considered that style too severe for her broad, plain face. However, her hair was so yellow and fluffy now that it looked like a blossom on the end of the squash.
As Nancy, her attorney, and I all took our places at the table — me across from them — I wondered why the county had decided to replace the dignified navy blue jumpsuits formerly worn by our inmates with these orange monstrosities. The only people who looked good in them were prisoners with dark brown skin. Then it occurred to me that the woman responsible for buying new jumpsuits also had dark brown skin. Maybe she hoped to give incarcerated folks a chance to feel good about themselves? If so, she had failed Nancy. I could not remember seeing a sadder, madder, drabber prisoner in my life.
Beside her, Shep Faxon looked like a magazine ad in a gray silk suit. Each silver hair was in place, and he wore the complacent look of an attorney who is going to earn lots of money no matter what happens to his client. Shep was a longtime member of the old-boy network in Hope County and the attorney for most of our aristocrats.
“Mornin’, Mac,” he said in his lazy drawl. Shep had never abided by the courtesy Joe Riddley established of calling law enforcement and court personnel by titles in public.
“Good morning, Counselor,” I replied. “Good morning, Nancy. You wanted to see me?”
She glared at me across the table, dabbing her nose with a soggy, used tissue. Her eyes were red and soaked with tears, and her mascara had run down her cheeks, leaving little runnels in the thick layer of makeup she wore to hide the pocks from teenage acne. “I want you to get me out of here.”
Shep and I exchanged glances. “I’ve explained the procedure and instructed her to say nothing, but she won’t listen to me.”
Nancy glowered at him. “Mac’s my friend.”
“I understand you are being charged with attempted murder.” I figured we might as well get right down to business.
She flared her nostrils and narrowed her eyes until they looked like a pig’s in her plump face. “I did not try to kill her. If I had, she’d be dead.”
I sat there puzzled while she dabbed her nose again with a sodden tissue. Last I’d seen, Willena
was
dead. Very dead.
was
dead. Very dead.
Shep put a hand on her arm to restrain her, but Nancy was impossible to restrain. “I shot at the ceiling,” she said angrily, looking from him to me and back at him again. “Anybody can see that who bothers to look. I wanted to warn her, not kill her. How soon can you get me out of here, Mac? Shep is useless.” She shifted her chair an inch or two to distance herself from him.
Shep looked at his fingernails. I stared at Nancy.
Shot? At the ceiling?
I wriggled in my chair, trying to get comfortable, but the seat was too high for anything but my toes to reach the floor. Before I asked any questions, I had to make one thing clear. “I can’t get you out, honey. A charge of attempted murder means you have to go before a superior court judge. The magistrate who heard your case will send a letter to superior court, and they’ll send a judge to hear the case. He ought to be here Monday or Tuesday afternoon.”
“The DAR meets Tuesday morning. I have to preside.”
“Somebody else may need to preside for you this month.”
Every line of her face, from the drawn-together eyebrows down to the taut set of her chin, proclaimed that she thought I wasn’t really trying; that if I wanted to, I could pull strings and get her out. Nancy had lived too long in a world where strings dangle for the pulling. Now she was up against the neat package of Georgia legal procedure. When it works right, there are no strings to pull.
Maybe something in my face convinced her I was telling the truth, because her eyes filled with a new cloud of tears that spilled out and ran down her cheeks. “It’s all his fault. Why did he do this to me?” She flung herself on the table, head cradled on one arm, and sobbed. Her shoulders shook, and she boo-hooed loud enough to be heard uptown. The small hill of tissues she had dropped onto the table didn’t have much use in them. She dragged a couple more from her pocket, but they were equally soggy. For a woman with money in the bank, she seemed remarkably short on fresh tissues.
I found a pack in my clutch and handed her a couple. “Do you want to tell me what this is about? You don’t have to, but I don’t have a clue.”
Nancy blew her nose and wadded the tissue like she’d rather be wadding somebody’s head. “Horace,” she blurted. “He’s having an affair.” She flung that tissue on the hill, like she wished it were a grenade she was lobbing somewhere in Horace’s vicinity.
Shep looked out the shatterproof window at a flock of robins that had landed on the lawn and were looking for worms the week’s storm had brought to the surface. He seemed unusually embarrassed for a man known for coarse language and ribald humor in the country club locker room. I didn’t know whether a crying woman made him nervous or if he’d known about the affair for a while and was embarrassed at having such a naïve client.
I did know this must be a tremendous blow for Nancy. When she’d met Horace fifteen years before, she had been a stocky high school chemistry teacher from down in Way-cross who had driven up to Middle Georgia Kaolin to see if her students could visit the mine on a field trip. Meeting the heir to the company and marrying him must have seemed like a fairy tale come true, even if he did look more frog than prince. Now she stood to lose both Horace and all he represented.
For those who don’t know, kaolin is a chalky substance used in a lot of products from cosmetics to the nose cones of rockets, and a good percentage of the entire world’s kaolin supply is mined in central Georgia. I’ve never figured out what’s so secret about the process, but even fifteen years ago, security was tight at Middle Georgia Kaolin. Nancy couldn’t get past the receptionist. She created a ruckus, demanding to at least see somebody higher up, and Horace, who had recently graduated from college and joined his daddy’s business, was sent out to deal with the trouble-maker. He couldn’t take her on a tour, but he took her out to dinner. Even though she was five years older than he and equally plain, they were married six months later.
When I first heard that story, I wondered if it was Nancy’s spunk that had attracted him, for spunk was never Horace’s strong suit. He was a big, bumbling man with thick glasses, a large nose, and a mat of dark hair with so many cowlicks that no matter who cut it, he looked like he was wearing a wig made of guinea pig fur. I don’t know whom he would have married or what he would have done with his life if his family hadn’t owned a company and taught him to run it, because with that abrupt, abrasive personality, he would never have found a wife or risen through the ranks of business on his charm. Even Joe Riddley, who sees the good in most folks, never found anything better to say about Horace than, “At least he has the common sense not to run his business into the ground.”
Since Middle Georgia Kaolin was privately held, nobody had ever known exactly how much the Jensens were worth, but their primary clients were paper mills, which use kaolin to make paper smooth and shiny. Given how much paper is used, the Jensens had never lacked the simple necessities of life—a bed at night, running water, three square meals a day, ostentatious houses, expensive cars, and jaunts to various parts of the globe.
Soon after Horace and Nancy were married, they had built an enormous granite house out beside the country club golf course, surrounded by fifteen acres of woods. When MayBelle’s subdivisions started encroaching on their borders, Horace circled the entire property with a high stone wall and Hopemore’s first security gate. Nancy, who had expected to teach after she was married, found instead that Horace expected her to devote her time, as his mother and grandmother had, to committees and clubs. I’d served with her on several church committees and found her a thoughtful and creative member.
Right now, though, it looked like she’d been creative without being thoughtful.
Not that Horace had ever appreciated either her creativity or her intelligence. Nancy had confided to me once, “I would have preferred a light, airy, modern house surrounded by flower beds, but Horace wanted the fortress.” I guess if your business is taking things out of the earth, it makes sense to build your house of granite, but I’d been there a couple of times and it was too dark and gloomy for me. It was also a monument to the taste of a famous Atlanta decorator. As far as I could tell, neither Nancy nor Horace had impressed their personalities on the place. In Horace’s case that was a blessing, but it always made me mad to hear him say in public, with his braying laugh, “We had to hire a decorator. Nancy has no taste, you know.”
They must have hoped for lots of children, because the house had eight bedrooms, but only one son ever arrived: Horace Junior, known as Race. He was a good student, a good athlete, and looked like his mother. On a boy, though, the round face, wheat blond hair, eyes like chips of sapphire, and wide, engaging grin looked cute. He had Nancy’s personality, too — calm, thoughtful, helpful, and generous. The only thing Horace seemed to have contributed to his breeding were cowlicks. Race had a number of those, which may be why he generally kept his hair cut to less than an inch. Now a freshman in high school, he said he wanted to study business at the University of Georgia. He ought to be an asset to Middle Georgia Kaolin one day.
Unlike his father, who had matured into a stingy, crabby man who confused his ability to grab kaolin from the ground with a right to grab anything he wanted. If he had decided to run around on Nancy and replace her with a younger trophy wife, Nancy would have a hard time getting much recompense from those tight, furry fists.
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