Guess Who's Coming to Die? (16 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

BOOK: Guess Who's Coming to Die?
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“We could at least taste it,” Shateika grumbled. But she reached for one jug and began to unscrew the lid. I went upstairs to the
glug-glug
of a gallon jug emptying into the sink.
I had attended meetings at Wilma’s, but had never been upstairs. Oil paintings of Kenans in heavy gilt frames lined the stairwell. All of them wore sleek, satisfied looks. The men were subdued, but the women were peacocks in diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. At the far back of the upstairs hall, lit by a small picture light like a household shrine, stood Granddaddy Will with a lady I presumed was his wife. I couldn’t remember her name, but I remembered those diamond-and-emerald dangling earrings. They were the ones Willena wore the night she died. I wondered where they were now, and what happened to the matching brooch shown in the painting on the breast of a green velvet dress. The brooch was a gold square with a diamond in each corner and three matched emeralds in the center. Nobody would wear a brooch like that nowadays, so I guessed it lay in some jewelry box here upstairs, immortal and unworn.
In a dim corner of the hall I spotted a picture I found far more charming than ancestors in oil. It was a sepia photo of a large family sitting on the front porch of an unpainted farmhouse while two black servants (slaves?) and a mule stood nearby in the yard. I wondered if one of the boys on the front steps, barefoot and in short pants, was Granddaddy Will. Probably. What else would cause Wilma to keep that humble picture among her grand ones?
Wilma’s bedroom was surprising. Given the rest of her house, I expected a decor frozen around 1890. Instead, I found green wall-to-wall carpet and gold-and-white French provincial furniture that had been in style back when Wilma was a teenager. My guess was that it had been redone then and never since. Pink roses ran rampant on the wallpaper, comforter, and the canopy over the queen-sized bed, while the bed itself sported such a mound of lace-edged white pillows that I wondered how long it took the maid to remove them each night. Did a raging romantic still live underneath Wilma’s frozen historical façade? Was that why she was still awaiting Prince Charming?
More silver frames gleamed from the mantelpiece, so I crossed a carpet as thick and green as grass to check them out. Wilma smiled at me from every frame. Fat pigtails on both shoulders, she grinned a gap-toothed smile from astride a glossy brown pony. At around ten she sat on the couch carefully holding a fat baby who must be Willena. At fifteen she held aloft a cake she had baked and won a prize for in home economics class. That picture, I remembered, had been in the paper, as had the next one: Wilma at eighteen in a cloud of white tulle, holding her father’s arm at her presentation ball. Her pointy little face looked so hopeful back then, when she had confidence her prince would soon arrive.
Mr. Billy had certainly been no prince. Little, crabby, and sharp-tongued, he couldn’t have been pleasant to live with, particularly when he got old and suffered greatly from what they called “sugar di-beetees” back then. Wilma had cared for him faithfully, overseeing his diet and even giving him his shots on the nurse’s night off. Maybe I ought to exercise some compassion in her direction. After all, while I couldn’t imagine putting pictures of myself in my bedroom, I had pictures of children and grandchildren to scatter around.
Poor little rich woman, with nobody to love her.
14
I went back down to Wilma and gave her three handkerchiefs. While I was gone, Linette had refreshed my glass of tea, so I sat again, sipped tea, and chatted a few minutes longer. Eventually I managed to ask whether Wilma remembered where people were sitting during the first half of the meeting and where the little boxed gift set was during the break.
She shook her head. “I was thinking about refreshments.” She gave a watery little sniff and dabbed her nose with a fresh pink handkerchief. “I couldn’t tell you where anybody was sitting if my life depended on it.” She stopped, then added in a voice of spite, “Except for MayBelle, of course. She was at the back, with Sadie Lowe.”
That was interesting. MayBelle had been sitting on the front row after the break, but she was still standing when I first came into the room. She had come over to welcome me, then had honed right in on Grover as he arrived. Gusta had ordered Cindy and me to come sit with her and Meriwether in the third row about that time, so I hadn’t noticed where MayBelle sat.
“I thought Willena was going to love her present.” Wilma’s voice quavered. “I spent seven hundred dollars on that set, Mac, and you know good and well they won’t take it back now, with a missing corkscrew.”
No, I didn’t think they would. Who but Wilma would even entertain that notion?
“But you didn’t see who had it last before the break?”
She shook her head. “I was thinking about refreshments,” she repeated.
That reminded me of something else I wanted to ask her. “What did Willena eat that evening, do you remember? Some people said she was sick in the ladies’ room.”
Wilma bridled. “It certainly wasn’t my food. She left before I served refreshments.”
Of course she had. Why hadn’t I remembered that? I was so embarrassed, I wanted to crawl out the door, but the notion of a trial — with Cindy in the defendant’s seat — spurred me on. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how the front door got unlocked, do you?”
She looked startled. “The door was unlocked?” She pressed one hand to her heart. “I remember now. The chief told us. I guess that explains how he got in.”
Now I was the startled one. “Who?”
“The dreadful man who did this thing. I have racked my brain all week, wondering when he got in. I figured he had to have come in early that morning while Dexter was carrying out the trash, and hidden in the building all day long.”
I tried to think how to ask the next question. “So you don’t think any of us could have done it?”
“Oh, no!” Wilma compressed her mouth into a sad little bow. She got up, drifted over to the window, and stood with her back to me, one hand on the drape. Her shoulders slumped. Finally she said in a choked voice, “I mean, several people might have thought it, but they never meant it. I’ve said myself, ‘I’m going to kill her!’ when she volunteered for something and then put off what needed to be done until I had to help her with it. Willena could be lazy, you know, and difficult when she wanted her own way. But I am going to miss her so much.” She raised the pink handkerchief to her eyes, then turned with a bewildered frown. “You know what’s silly? I’m almost as angry with her for dying as I am with whoever killed her. I keep thinking that if she hadn’t spent so much time in that bathroom . . . She could have come out with MayBelle, or Meriwether. But it always did take her half an hour to fix her face.” She sniffed and blinked back tears, then turned to stare out the window again.
“Anger is a natural part of grief,” I assured her.
I was about to get up and leave when she turned around and asked in a funny little voice, “You don’t really think one of us might have done it, do you?”
I tucked my clutch more firmly under my arm. “I was just wondering,” I said.
She shook her head like she was trying to think that through. “I can’t imagine any of us doing such a dreadful thing. Of course Nancy has been dreadfully jealous of Willena lately, because of Horace.”
When I didn’t say anything, she explained. “Horace wanted to marry Willena before he met Nancy, you know. Willena turned him down, of course—he had no charm whatsoever, and she had no need to marry him for his money. But Horace was set on marrying Willena. He married Nancy on the rebound.”
If I stretched my mind back twenty years, I could remember Horace and Willena dancing together at country club dances, but I’d never seen them as a couple. For one thing, he was three years younger. That’s a lot at that age. For another, he was already a plump young man with unruly hair, beads of moisture on his forehead, and sweaty palms. Only an egoist like Horace would think he had a chance with Willena back when she was still fresh and lovely.
Had she begun to have second thoughts?
“I thought she and Grover—” I began.
Wilma’s pink handkerchief sketched a graceful wave. “Oh, no. They are”—she gulped and soldiered on—“they
were
friends. Nothing more.” She turned back to the window and her shoulders shook.
The transition from present to past tense is one of the most painful lessons in the school of grief. If Wilma had been almost any other woman, I’d have gone and put my arms around her, but I could not imagine touching Wilma Kenan. Nor that she would want me to.
I hated to seem ruthless, but I pressed her. “Had Willena and Horace become . . . er . . . friends again?”
Wilma sniffed and wiped her nose. “Oh, yes. You should have seen them dancing at the spring country club dance. Nancy got quite upset.” She turned back to stare out the window at her lovely yard. In a moment she added, “I suppose that Rachel Ford might have killed her, too. There is something about that young woman I do not trust. Do you feel it? Willena did. She said Rachel was extremely pushy.”
I myself had found Rachel surprisingly reserved for a New Yorker, but I wanted to encourage Wilma to talk. “New Yorkers are more aggressive than we are. I think they have to be that way simply to get through the crowds on their way to work. Did Rachel do something particularly pushy?”
Wilma turned, her eyes bright with tears and pink spots on each cheek. “Oh, my, yes. Not long after she got to town, Grover told Willena that Rachel had been a prominent attorney in New York before she moved here, and he thought she would appreciate it if we made her feel at home. Willena said we’d do what we could, of course, so she invited Rachel for coffee one Sunday afternoon. She invited me, too. Do you know, Mac, that young woman wandered all over the downstairs of Willena’s house! Willena wondered if she was considering making an offer on the place, but it looked to me like she was casing the place to come back and rob it. I warned Willena to be careful about locking up after she left.”
“How did she get into the investment club?” I hoped I wasn’t stepping over some invisible boundary, being too pushy myself.
Apparently not. Wilma pursed her lips and answered readily. “It was not my doing, I can tell you that. She became friends with Meriwether, who nominated her, and then Gusta said having a lawyer in the group might come in handy. You know good and well that what Gusta wants, Gusta gets. I was the only dissenting vote. Even Willena voted for her. But if you could have seen the way Rachel sucked up to Willena after she got in! After every single meeting I was left to cool my heels while they talked. Rachel could not seem to leave Willena alone.” Wilma sat suddenly in the nearest chair. “I cannot like her,” she repeated.
“But she never threatened Willena or anything, did she?” It sounded to me like Rachel wanted to make a quick entry into Hopemore society without realizing that those things take time in Georgia. Or maybe she and Willena were becoming friends.
“No, she never threatened her. . . .” Wilma let her voice trail off. I got the impression that Rachel had done other things, but Wilma wasn’t ready to reveal them to me. She continued, “And at least she’s not common, like Sadie Lowe. Willena and I both spoke against
her
invitation, but again, Gusta insisted. She said Sadie Lowe isn’t experienced in handling large sums of money and we have a responsibility to make sure it doesn’t just flow through her fingers.” I translated that to mean “flow out of Hopemore.”
Wilma’s mouth curved into a prim little smile. “But after we voted her in, Willena told Sadie Lowe in no uncertain terms that she’d have to dress appropriately for meetings.” She gave a tinkling artificial laugh. “We didn’t need her sitting there on the front row with her skirt hiked up and Grover able to see all her hidden assets.”
I couldn’t see that wearing too-short skirts made a woman a prime candidate for murderess. I couldn’t even see that being interested in an old house with lots of charm qualified Rachel. Sounded to me like Nancy was the only good suspect so far.
I set down my tea and stood. “I’d better be going. Clarinda will be expecting me. She has strong feelings about people who are late for dinner.”
Wilma hurried across the room and clutched my forearm. “Could I ask you a favor before you go? Say no if you want to, but Willena and I were supposed to go to Augusta tomorrow for me to speak to a women’s group about Granddaddy Will. I hate to disappoint them on such short notice, and it might do me good to get out of town, but I don’t think I can bear to drive up by myself. Could you possibly ride with me? Chief Muggins has given me permission, and I know he’d let you go, too. Lincoln will drive.” Which meant that “by myself ” wasn’t strictly accurate.
Still, I could understand how she might feel reluctant to go without Willena, thinking about her the whole way. It was pitiful, though, if I was the closest thing Wilma had to a friend. I scarcely knew the woman. I also wanted to hear her talk about her beloved ancestor about as much as I wanted to have an ingrown toenail cut out without anesthetic, but as I hesitated, she added, “You don’t have to attend the meeting, if you have other errands you could be running.”
That would be as good a time as any to look for recliners.
“I’ll go if I can drive,” I agreed. “I’ll need my car up there.” We settled on nine o’clock for me to pick her up, and I headed to the door.

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