Guess Who's Coming to Die? (15 page)
Read Guess Who's Coming to Die? Online
Authors: Patricia Sprinkle
She pulled off her gloves and threw them on top of her weeds, then clomped across the grass in my direction, talking as she came. “The weeds are growing like wildfire with all the rain we’ve been having, so I thought I’d pull some while the ground is soft. My grounds are sorely neglected. The trees need pruning, the borders need edging, and the liriope is taking over my lawn.” As she reached me, she took off her hat and held it loosely at her side. “I’m needing to get somebody out here to help me, but you know as well as I do that you can’t get anybody to work anymore.”
What she meant was, she was reaching the limits of Hopemore’s available gardeners. No wonder. She worked her yard men like slaves, paid them as little as she could get away with, and insisted on supervising and criticizing every blessed thing they did. I suspected she was hinting that it would be neighborly of me to send one of our landscaping crews out for a day or two as my contribution to alleviating her sorrow, but I couldn’t. Most of our lawn service staff had worked for Wilma at one time or another, and they had all nodded when one of them begged me, “Doan ever send me out to her place to work, Miss Mac. There’s not a man God ever made who can dig or prune to suit that woman.”
When I hadn’t said what she expected, she added, “Lincoln can mow, but that’s about all he’s good for in the yard.”
I felt a spurt of resentment on Lincoln’s behalf. The man kept her old Cadillac up and running and did most repairs on that huge house. When would he have time for yardwork?
I didn’t know what to say, to tell the truth. She had discombobulated me by being out in the garden. I had expected to find her lying on her couch, prostrate with grief, dabbing her nose with a lace-edged cotton handkerchief, wailing about losing Willena. (Wilma, unlike Nancy, never used tissues if she could help it, and if she had to use a tissue, she never, ever used it more than once.)
Wilma must have seen my puzzlement, because she gave me a sad little smile. “I can’t simply sit in the house and think about what’s happened. I have to be doing something, or I’d go mad. Nothing comforts me like working in the yard.” She reached into her pocket and, sure enough, brought out a white cotton handkerchief edged in an inch of lace.
I held out my dish. “I brought you some of Clarinda’s chicken pecan casserole. You said you liked it at the Garden Club luncheon.”
“Thank you so much. Let’s go inside. I was ready to quit here, anyway.”
Carrying my offering before me, I followed her up the brick walk. The paint on the house was a little dull and peeling in places, I noticed, but that wouldn’t last long. Wilma might be stingy in other ways, but she never begrudged a dollar to keep up the old Kenan home place.
Near the front steps she detoured to a spigot and daintily washed the mud and yard trash off her boots. As she led me up the steps, her boots made wet footprints and some mud still clung, for the rusty water looked like Willena’s blood. I shuddered.
Before we reached the front door, it was opened by Linette, Wilma’s housekeeper for at least thirty years. Linette was long and lean, with a stride that let you know she knew where she was going and planned to get there. She adored Wilma and shared her dedication to perfection. Over the years she had supervised an army of young women who came in twos and threes to work for a while before throwing up their hands in despair and leaving with the cry, “They is too particular out at Miss Kenan’s and don’t pay you enough to live on.” I didn’t know what Linette and Lincoln earned, but at least they lived in.
She handed Wilma a thick white washcloth, already damp, with an equally thick white towel. Then she took my casserole with a murmured, “Thank you so much,” and headed for the kitchen with a swish of starched gray uniform skirt.
While Wilma seated herself in a rocker to wipe her hands and face and exchange her boots for neat tan walking shoes that sat ready, I stood wondering how she got maids to wear starched uniforms. Clarinda has worked for me for forty years, but what it would take to get her into a starched uniform would entail more grief than I am willing to endure. Are rich girls taught at their mother’s knee how to manage household help? Clarinda basically manages me.
Wilma dropped the washcloth and towel onto the porch floor and held out a foot. “Would you help me, MacLaren?” Then she noticed my bandaged hand. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” I figured Linette usually performed that service and had used my casserole as an excuse to escape.
Shod and tidy, Wilma stood. “Come on inside for a little while. Linette will bring us some tea.” She left her damp boots beside the towel and washcloth on the porch floor.
Linette already had glasses of iced tea dressed with wedges of lemon sitting on silver coasters on mahogany tables in the living room. I moseyed behind Wilma into the world of high ceilings, carved woodwork, heart-pine floors covered with ancient Oriental rugs, silver and china on each available surface, and pressed-brass valances above dark green brocade drapery. An antebellum Chickering piano sat in one corner of the living room, adorned with family portraits in silver frames: Wilma’s parents’ wedding picture, a family picture taken when Wilma was about three, and a studio portrait of Mr. Billy, her dad, when he must have been about sixty-five. An oil painting of Granddaddy Will hung over the fireplace. He looked genial and satisfied with the house he’d created. The upholstered chair in the painting still sat beside a marble-topped table near the window, and the upholstery looked the same. Two old sofas, stiff and hard, faced each other near the fireplace.
Bookshelves built on each side of the fireplace held only leather-bound books. Wilma kept her modern hardcover or paperback books with bright covers in a sitting room-cumoffice at the back of the house, where they wouldn’t sully Granddaddy Will’s library.
The liveliest thing in the living room were rainbows that jiggled on the stark white walls as sunbeams touched crystal prisms in the dining room chandelier next door.
Our Georgia sun can be hard on fabrics. I saw that some of the upholstery was worn on the chairs near the window, and Wilma’s drapery and wallpaper had begun to fade, but she would never replace them until she could match exactly what had been there a hundred years before. It might cost her a pretty penny, but she would never think of running up to Augusta for something she liked, like the rest of us — and, probably, like the ancestress whose taste she now so slavishly followed.
She took the sofa on one side of the fireplace and nodded for me to take the one across from her. The slick seat was infernally uncomfortable, hard as a brick, and too high for me to reach the floor. Wilma valued seats more for which of her ancestors had sat on them than for the comfort they provided. I resisted an impulse to tuck my feet under me and reached for my tea.
Wilma sipped, set down her glass, and finally said what I’d expected to hear when I first arrived. “Oh, MacLaren, you are so sweet to come. Can you believe what’s happened?” That was as far as she got before the composure she had found in the garden crumbled. She pulled out her wisp of a handkerchief and watered it thoroughly. When she could speak again, she wailed, “I don’t know how I’m going to get on without Willena. I always thought I’d go first.”
With her nose red and her eyes pink, her resemblance to a weasel was pronounced. I hoped Prince Charming didn’t come riding up the drive that afternoon.
I pulled the two tissues I still had left after Nancy’s crying jag out of my clutch and offered them, but Wilma waved them away. “Would you ask Linette to run up and get me a fresh hankie, please?”
Marveling that a woman could live in this day and age without fetching her own handkerchiefs, I wended my way to the kitchen. At least old Will hadn’t insisted on a kitchen out behind the house, like plantations used to have, with enough space between house and kitchen for grass to grow. Wilma’s kitchen was at the back of the house, largely unchanged since Wilma’s daddy had remodeled it in the early fifties. I had accompanied my mama to a Garden Club meeting there as a young teen and remembered Mr. Billy taking us all back to show us what he called, proudly, “the Cadillac of kitchens.” The cabinets were white enameled steel topped with stainless steel, the stove and sink both built into the countertop. The stove must have been a good one, for it was still in use.
The floor was both modern and historically accurate, for Mr. Billy’s black-and-white linoleum squares had been pulled up and the heart pine floor refinished to a glossy glow.
Linette stood at an oak table in the center of the room, polishing Wilma’s silver punch bowl. Silver trays and the ladle waited their turn, glinting in a ray of morning sun. The table was mighty low for somebody as tall as Linette to work at. Her back must ache at night.
A second maid in uniform stood at the sink contemplating two plastic gallon jugs of pale yellow liquid. As I came in she was asking Linette in a scandalized voice, “You want me to pour all that good juice and stuff down the sink?”
When Linette saw me, she asked, “Yes, ma’am?” instead of answering her companion.
“Wilma needs a fresh handkerchief,” I told her. Seeing something glitter like silver through the window, I moseyed over to peer down a long grassy alley between two rows of Spanish oaks. “What a lovely vista. Is that the river down there?” I hadn’t realized that Wilma lived so close to one of the coils of the little river that snakes through our county on its way to the Ogeechee and the sea.
“Yes, ma’am.” Linette sounded as proud as if it were her own home. “I keep tellin’ Miss Wilma that the best view in the house is from the kitchen.”
“An’ I keep tellin’ you she shouldn’t be cuttin’ that mistletoe now. She could make a fortune selling it come Christmas,” muttered the young woman at the sink.
We don’t have Spanish moss this far inland, but many of our big trees are blessed with a bumper crop of mistletoe. The parasite is harvested each winter for Christmas sales.
Linette huffed. “She don’t need the money, so she can cut it when she wants to. It’s pesky stuff, mistletoe.” She cast a worried look toward the window. “But Lincoln is too old to be up there cutting it down. She’s had him at it all this past week.”
I looked again and noticed a ladder propped up against one of the far trees. The branches gave an occasional quiver that couldn’t be the wind.
I wouldn’t be cutting it at all if it were mine. I know it’s not good for trees, but they live for decades with it in their branches, and it adds a nice touch of green to the landscape in winter.
Bless her heart, I wondered whether Wilma had ever been kissed beneath the mistletoe.
Then I remembered I was here on an errand of mercy. “Handkerchiefs. Wilma needs a fresh one,” I reminded Linette.
She jerked her head toward the door. “They’re in the top drawer of her dresser. Shateika, run up and fetch one.”
“I’ll get it,” I offered. “You all look busy.” The way pots were bubbling on the stove, preparations for dinner were under way, and my casserole was wholly superfluous.
Linette hesitated, then nodded. “Front room on the right, up the stairs. The handkerchiefs are in the left-hand drawer. If you can’t find them, ask Jackie. She’s up there vacuuming.”
I nodded toward the punch bowl, ladle, and trays. “When did Wilma get those back?”
Linette gave the bowl one more wipe and reached for a tarnish-proof bag. “This mornin’. She tole me to call the police and ax them to bring her things. She didn’t want them lying around the community center kitchen with folks tromping in and out. The chief himself brung them right before you got here.”
Given that Willena had been killed far down the hall and that her murder probably had no bearing on Wilma’s family silver, it made sense that the silver should have been returned already. On the other hand, from the expression of the second maid, she knew as well as I did that if it had been one of the rest of us who had left something in a building where a crime was committed, we’d have had to wait until the investigation was complete before retrieving our belongings. America may be a classless society, but like somebody said, some are more equal than others.
“We had a real tragedy that night,” I allowed, propping myself against the doorjamb. “I know you’ve been a comfort to Wilma.”
Linette pressed her lips together. “I wish I had been here when Miss Wilma got home. Miss MayBelle put her to bed and stayed until we got back, but she’s not what I’d call a comforting sort.”
“Not really,” I agreed, mentally adding,
Not unless you prefer to be comforted by reptiles.
Not unless you prefer to be comforted by reptiles.
“We wouldn’t have gone down to Dublin that night,” Linette continued, applying polish to the ladle, “but Miss Wilma insisted. She told me it had been too long since we saw our Leroy. He’s got a new baby, you know. So she said she could handle things at the meeting. I wish I’d gone with her. I surely do. If I’d known . . .”
Linette sounded like she was settling in for a long chat, but Wilma needed that handkerchief, so I brought things to a close. “She’s lucky to have you,” I assured her. “You take good care of her, now.”
“I will.” Linette spoke in a docile voice to me, but her tone sharpened as she instructed the woman by the sink, “Go ahead and pour it out. I mixed that pineapple juice with real cream and other things. It’s probably sour by now, and if it isn’t, Miss Wilma ain’t never gonna drink it. It would remind her of what happened.”
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