Guess Who's Coming to Die? (26 page)
Read Guess Who's Coming to Die? Online
Authors: Patricia Sprinkle
“I’m presuming from all this that the family didn’t have much money, and that Rachel bought her house here with her mother’s and brother’s estates. So how did she get in the investment club?”
“Meriwether nominated her,” Gusta spoke with asperity. “I told her it wasn’t suitable, but—”
“But Rachel is smart, and she needs to learn how to invest money. Besides, she knew Grover in New York. He and her brother went to Haverford together, and he used to come home with her brother for holidays or something.”
“Then her brother must have been a lot older than she.”
“I guess so.” Meriwether obviously hadn’t given that any thought.
I remembered something. “Wilma told me Thursday that Grover asked Willena to help make Rachel feel at home here. Maybe he was the one who told her about the job at the law center.”
I could not imagine our Poverty Law Center board advertising in New York City, but they might have run an ad in the Augusta paper. Wilma had also said that Grover told Willena that Rachel had been a prominent attorney in New York. Was he doing a favor for his old buddy’s little sister? Or was there something between them that nobody knew about? I remembered that the two of them had gone out into the parking lot together in the streaming rain. That merited more thought at a later time.
Right now, Meriwether was setting her cup on its saucer with a delicate click, and then she stood. “It’s been great, Nana, but I’d better get back before Zach kills Jed or vice versa.”
“I keep telling you that man knows nothing about raising children,” Gusta snapped. “Growing up with those two awful Blaines, he’ll probably be pouring whiskey down that infant’s throat any day now. Next time, you bring the baby with you, you hear me?”
“Shall I give you a lift?” I offered.
When Meriwether had moved into her own home and out of her grandmother’s, Gusta had carried on like she was moving to Iowa. She actually lived three long blocks away.
Meriwether hesitated. “I could walk, it’s so gorgeous, but I am tired. Zach is teething and was up most of the night.” She plucked her sweater away from her chest. “And if I don’t get home soon to feed him, I’m going to be one sopping mess.”
As Gusta let out a scandalized “Do!” Meriwether gave me a wink.
23
The young DuBoses lived on Liberty Street, a five-block stretch of comfortable one-story houses built between 1890 and 1920. The area had gone through a dismal period beginning in the 1950s, when the fashion was for small brick ranch houses farther out of town, but had been rediscovered in the eighties and nineties by young couples with an eye for charm and more energy than money. They had restored the old houses, and painted them in pleasant shades of blue, green, yellow, white, and cream, with contrasting shutters. Children now played on the sidewalks and in small front lawns, cats sunned on porches, and patches of flowers brightened almost every yard.
As I pulled to a stop in front of Meriwether’s house, she pointed to one diagonally across the street. “Rachel’s front door is standing open. Do you want to see her house?”
“Won’t she mind?” I hated the idea of going up to an almost-stranger’s house to invite myself in.
Meriwether laughed. “On this street? It’s downright neighborly to go see what progress has been made on a house. I understand that several years ago, a favorite pastime if you got depressed was visiting your neighbors to see how much worse their places looked than your own. I really need to feed Zach, or I’d take you over. Knock and call through the door. She’ll be glad to show you around. Don’t expect miracles, though. She’s doing most of the work herself. But she started inside, so she’s accomplished more than shows from here.”
I certainly hoped so. The place had been owned most of my lifetime by a grim old widow who had let the place deteriorate as her eyesight and resources failed. Yet whenever a young couple had approached about buying, she had declared, “I don’t aim to sell this house till I die.”
“And how,” Joe Riddley had asked me in private, “does she plan to sell it then?”
She had finally died a year or so before, and her grandson in Atlanta had been delighted to sell it to Rachel. Why Rachel wanted it, I could not imagine. What I could see from the street wasn’t enticing, except for one corner made up of curved windows. We’d had a corner like that in our big blue house. Otherwise, it had a plain front with double windows on either side of a narrow door, a pointed tin roof, peeling white clapboard siding, and a small front porch with banisters like a chorus line of fat women’s legs. Whoever had built it lacked originality and flair.
As I crossed the street, I noticed that the chorus line was missing several legs, and the sidewalk was cracked and had lifted in several places. Rachel hadn’t done a thing about the peeling white paint or the yard, which was little more than a small plot of patchy grass and scraggly bushes. I wondered if she would be offended if I offered to send my son Ridd over for a consultation. Ridd is legendary for his ability to transform barren yards into showplaces, and if he weren’t already happy as a high school math teacher and part-time farmer, he could make a good living helping other folks landscape their yards.
This did not look to me like the house of a prosperous attorney, but in front sat a shiny black Lexus that looked suspiciously like Slade’s. Had he come this early on a Saturday to try to wring blood from this particular turnip?
I stood at the front door and knocked. “Hello?”
“Come in,” Rachel called from somewhere inside. “We can’t come to the door right this minute.”
I walked hesitantly into the front hall. The hall was dim and chilly out of the sun, and smelled of sawed wood, Sheetrock mud, and some kind of chemical that made me suspect she had opened the door to let fumes out. The floor was rough and littered with scraps of wood and drifts of sawdust. One doorjamb was fresh and unpainted, while white patches on the dingy blue walls indicated the plaster had needed numerous repairs.
“We’re in here.” Rachel sounded out of breath. I found her standing on a couple of boards laid across two sawhorses in the middle of the living room, screwing a large brass light fixture to the ceiling. It gleamed in the dim room. Brass polish was what I had smelled.
Slade stood on the boards beside her, holding it up while she screwed it in place. Her breathlessness, I deduced, came not from standing so near him but from the exertion of standing so long with her arms overhead. “Okay,” she announced with satisfaction. “That ought to hold.” She turned and looked down at me in surprise but no special delight. “Hello, Judge.”
“Hey, there. I was dropping Meriwether off, and she suggested I come look at your house.”
“Sure.” She squatted and jumped down, then bounded to her feet with an agility that made me envious. Her face, however, was not as energetic as the rest of her. She still looked pale, and even sadder than she had the day before. I wondered if her run-in with Wilma the previous afternoon had anything to do with that.
For construction work she had pulled her hair carelessly back and secured it with a rubber band. Tendrils of curls were escaping, but they looked messy rather than charming. She wore paint-stained jeans and a T-shirt, and hadn’t bothered to put on a speck of makeup, even lipstick.
Slade, of course, was immaculate in tan coveralls that set off his swarthy good looks. I suspected that underneath he had on pressed khaki slacks and a pretty polo shirt in yellow, green, or tan. He descended more cautiously from the boards across the sawhorses and brushed his hands together. “The place has a long way to go before it’s finished,” he warned. “Rachel’s doing most of the work herself.”
I tried to count up how many days it had been since they were going at it hammer and tongs in my parking lot. Certainly no more than four. And as recently as yesterday afternoon he had been maligning her name. Yet today he followed her into the kitchen like he half owned the place. I will never understand men if I live to be a hundred and raise a dozen of them.
However, I couldn’t help remembering that he had followed Meriwether around her house the same way back before she and Jed got engaged, and how Slade had even taken it on himself to supervise Meriwether’s workers while she was out of town.
“I haven’t started the kitchen yet,” Rachel apologized, standing in the middle of a dingy assortment of elderly appliances and cabinets. “I began with my bedroom and bath, so I’d have a haven to escape to, and then did my office, because I can’t stand to work in chaos. But now I keep tracking stuff in on the carpet.” She led the way to a pretty yet austere bedroom done in sage green and cream with a creamy Berber rug on the floor. The carpet looked a lot like the one Slade had in his office, except this one had trails of sawdust crisscrossing it.
The bathroom next door (for this house was too old to have a bath adjoining the master bedroom) sported a new tile floor and freshly painted woodwork, but the walls were bare. “I plan to paper in here,” she explained.
Slade stepped back to let Rachel lead the way into a small bedroom converted into an office painted taupe and cream. She looked so weary and sad, I wondered if she was getting dispirited at having taken on so much alone.
“It’s always a toss-up whether to do one room at a time or all the rooms at once,” I comforted her. “We had the same problem when we redid our house several years ago.”
Rachel sighed. “It’s a mess, whichever you choose. But I’ve painted the ceilings in the living room, dining room, and hall now, and with Slade’s help this morning I’ve gotten all the light fixtures in, so I can paint the walls and sand the floors. Or sand and paint. I don’t know which to do first. I don’t want to get sawdust on painted walls or paint on the newly finished floor.”
“Paint first,” I advised from experience. “The sanding machines vacuum up most of the dust.”
I followed her around, excessively admiring the work she had done and plans she had for what she still had to do, trying to strike at least one spark of enthusiasm in her face, but she continued to look like somebody who had swum halfway across a lake and realized it was going to be a long way to shore no matter which way she turned.
Finally she stopped in the front hall and asked, in a tone that was more duty than desire, “Would you like some coffee? I’ve got a pot made.”
Inwardly, I groaned. Much more coffee this morning and I’d get a quivering chin and shaky hands. But then I remembered I needed to talk to Rachel. I checked my watch. Ten thirty. I could stay another half hour. “That would be nice.”
“Do you want some, too, Slade?” she asked.
“No, thanks. While you’re on break, I’ll work in the bathroom taking down the lights over the lavatory and the towel bars. Then we’ll be ready to put up paper.”
“Fine.” She displayed no personal interest in him whatsoever. Maybe she knew Slade was looking for a rich and beautiful woman, or maybe she genuinely wasn’t attracted to him. I got the feeling, though, that she had something else on her mind, something so immense that it left no room for anything else. Could it be a certain corkscrew?
Slade moseyed back toward the bathroom, pulling a screwdriver from his overalls. I followed Rachel to the kitchen. While she poured coffee and found milk, I called the office to check that the store hadn’t burned down before I got there. “I’ll be in soon,” I promised Evelyn.
As I hung up, the sun glinted off something on the windowsill. I laid my cell phone on the counter and leaned across the sink to look closer. An emerald ring glowed in the morning sun, a large solitaire with two small diamonds on each side. “That’s gorgeous!” I exclaimed. “Weren’t you wearing this at the meeting the other night, with matching studs?”
Rachel picked it up, slipped it on her right hand, and held it to the sunlight. Her hands were large and well-shaped, with oval, unpolished nails. “I wear them a lot. They were my grandmother’s, all I have of hers.”
“Were you close?”
“No. She died when my mother was seven.”
“Was that the Jewish side of your family?”
She was setting out a plate of cookies, so she spoke without turning. “Not then. My grandfather was only nominally Jewish when he married my grandmother. She was Presbyterian, and they were both very young. After she died, though, he married a Jewish woman, and the family became observant. My uncle and his son both had bar mitzvahs and proper Jewish weddings, and my mother was raised as a Jew.”
“But she married an Italian Catholic? I guess that makes you . . . ?”
When she grinned, she was almost pretty. “An Episcopalian.” She handed me a mug of steaming coffee and her smile disappeared. She held out the plate of cookies. “Will you carry these? I’ll get the cream and spoons.” Once more she was the hostess taking time from a busy day to entertain an uninvited guest. “The best place to sit is on the porch. Slade?” She raised her voice. “I’ll be on the porch if you need me.”
As she led me to a couple of green plastic lawn chairs with a plastic table between, I said, “I’m glad to see you all have made up your differences. How did that happen?”
She shrugged. “Last night we ran into each other at the BI-LO frozen food section. We were both buying TV dinners, and I felt bad about yelling at him. I actually was going a little too fast in your parking lot, so I apologized and invited him to come over here to heat up his dinner. He’s not bad when he’s not yelling at you, and he said he likes working on houses, so he came over today to help with parts of mine I can’t do alone.”
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