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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

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BOOK: Guess Who's Coming to Die?
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Nobody looked real guilty, that I could see. Most gasped. Rachel exclaimed, “Oh, my God!” like New Yorkers are prone to do. Sadie Lowe dropped her purse and bent to pick it up. Cindy and Meriwether both grew pale. Gusta sat ramrod straight and regal.
Wilma staggered with a little cry, and would have fallen if MayBelle hadn’t caught her and steered her to an empty padded chair. She lowered Wilma into it, then asked the chief, “Are you absolutely sure she’s . . . gone?” The last word was obviously MayBelle’s second choice.
“Absolutely.” His eyes roamed the refreshment table. “Did you all have wine?” When we all shook our heads, he added with his customary tact, “She seems to have been killed with a silver corkscrew.”
Wilma keeled sideways. Her head hit another chair with a thud.
5
MayBelle knelt beside Wilma, rubbing her temples. “Somebody get me some water.”
When I jumped up, Chief Muggins ordered, “Don’t leave this room.”
“The kitchen is right there.” I pointed to the closed door. He jerked his head toward the punch bowl, which was still half-full. “Get some of that.”
I grabbed a cup, filled it with Wilma’s family recipe, and rushed it over to MayBelle. She was now giving Wilma’s cheeks sharp little pats, like some trainer on a televised boxing match. Without looking to see what was in the cup, she flung its contents into Wilma’s face.
Wilma pushed her away and struggled to sit up, gasping. “Look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined my clothes!” She glared at MayBelle, then must have remembered why she’d fainted in the first place. “Is it true? Willena’s dead?”
MayBelle nodded. “I’m afraid so, honey.” Her hands trembled and her eyes were frightened.
Wilma covered her face and seemed to shrink in her chair.
“No discussing the crime,” the chief commanded, then immediately broke his own rule. “Did any of you see anybody come in or leave this building?”
We exchanged blank stares and shook our heads in unison.
“Did any of you leave the room since the meeting began?”
An uneasy silence fell.
“You went out,” Sadie Lowe reminded Cindy. “You were gone the whole time we were having refreshments.”
The chief swung around in Cindy’s direction like a chimp ready to pounce. Cindy’s dark eyes burned with indignation. “I went to call my children, and I had to go all the way outside to get a signal. This building is hopeless for cell phones. But I didn’t see anybody out there.”
“Did you go to the bathroom?” he barked.
“N-no.” I wished she had sounded more definite.
“How long were you gone?”
“Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty?”
Sadie Lowe looked at her watch. “More like thirty. We had a long break.”
“Standing out in the rain?” Chief Muggins demanded, hard to convince.
Cindy bristled at his tone. “I had my umbrella. It’s in the front hall now, drying off.”
Charlie looked around at the others. “Anybody here able to verify she was outside the whole time?”
Nobody could. I got up and moved over near Cindy, who looked like she expected to mount the steps to the guillotine any minute. When I took her hand, she flinched. “Don’t let him get to you,” I whispered. “He’s big on intimidation.”
“Sadie Lowe, you went out, too,” MayBelle remembered.
Sadie Lowe shrugged as if we were discussing a trip to the beauty parlor. “I did go down to the bathroom, but Willena was alive when I left her, throwing up in one of the stalls. I left her some cream to take off her mascara. It had run,” she added to the chief, as if that explained everything.
Meriwether spoke up. “I went into the ladies’ room as Sadie Lowe was coming out.”
Sadie Lowe leaned toward Meriwether. “But we all know you didn’t kill Willena. Why should you?”
Meriwether looked pale. “Of course I didn’t. But Willena came out of the stall while I was there and said she’d eaten something for dinner that disagreed with her. I helped her wash her face. She was repairing her makeup when I left and said she’d be right back.” Her voice shook on the last phrase.
“Anybody else leave this room?” the chief snapped.
Wilma raised one hand weakly while the other still covered her face. “I was in and out of the kitchen all evening, fixing refreshments. It was my turn to furnish them.”
“Did you go to the bathroom?”
“When would I have had time?” She made it sound like she had personally prepared and catered a meal for hundreds, but she did have a point. She started rubbing her hands together as if they were cold. They made a dry, whispery sound in the silent room while the chief looked over the group.
“Okay, anybody else?” he finally asked.
Nobody spoke, but Meriwether turned and looked at MayBelle, as if waiting for her to say something.
MayBelle’s lips twitched with annoyance. “Okay,” she admitted, “I ran to the bathroom for a few seconds. Wilma was heating up cheese puffs in the oven, and I figured it might be a while before she got the table ready. Meriwether was leaving the bathroom as I went in.” She added in a defiant tone, “Willena was still alive and bitching when I left. Her hands were shaky, and she was having trouble getting her mascara on straight.”
“You were gone a long time,” Gusta remarked.
“I went to see if Dexter had fixed the toilet in the men’s room. It’s been running, and he had said he would fix it today, but he still hasn’t.” That year MayBelle chaired the committee that ran the center. She looked at Sadie Lowe. “You were gone a long time, too. You weren’t here when I got back.”
Sadie Lowe shrugged. “I went out on the porch to have a smoke.” She turned and raised one eyebrow in Rachel’s direction. “Right after I saw you go out the front door.”
We all swiveled to look at Rachel. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that drops of moisture on her hair had caught the light like diamonds while she was listening to Gusta talk about little Zach.
“I went to my car,” she explained. “I had left a tray here at a luncheon last week, and wanted to take it out so I wouldn’t forget it later.” That sounded harmless enough, so why did she sound like she was defying us to correct her?
“Did you see Mrs. Walker Yarbrough out there?” The chief jerked his head toward Cindy.
Rachel hesitated. “No, I didn’t. She wasn’t on the porch or steps out front when I went out or came back in.” She threw Cindy an apologetic glance.
Cindy’s lips twitched in annoyance. “I went down past the big red-tip bush to get a better signal. I saw you, though. Talking to Grover.” The last three words sounded like an accusation.
“Me, too,” Sadie Lowe said in a voice like a cat’s purr.
Rachel’s nostrils flared. “He had something he wanted to give me. A prospectus. We came right back in. And I didn’t see either one of you.” She glowered at Sadie Lowe.
“I was down at the far end of the porch in the dark,” Sadie Lowe told her. “Maybe you smelled my smoke?”
Rachel shook her head. Sadie Lowe shrugged and gave the chief a smile that visibly raised his blood pressure.
“How did you get back in?” I asked Rachel. “Wasn’t the front door locked?”
Rachel shook her head. “Cindy must have unlocked it.”
“It wasn’t me,” Cindy objected. “I didn’t even think about it when I went out.”
“So somebody from outside could have gotten in!” Wilma peered at the door anxiously.
The chief scratched his chin. “Coulda been a tramp,” he agreed. “I’ll check with Dexter.” He looked around the room again, as if taking inventory. “That’s everybody, then, except Miss Augusta and the judge, who found the body. I think we all will agree Miss Augusta is innocent.”
Innocent
wasn’t a word I’d apply to Gusta, given some of her past history, but I let it go. Some of the others were looking at me as if finding a body constituted creating one.
Wilma raised a weak hand and let it drop. “Nancy Jensen, our treasurer, was here, too, but she had to go home early. She got sick.”
“Did she leave the room?”
Wilma hesitated. “For a minute or two.”
“It was much longer than that.” Gusta was rubbing one of her vein-knotted hands over the other. I didn’t know if she was worried or if her arthritis was bothering her.
“Nancy is chairing the golf club committee annual dinner this year,” Meriwether explained quickly. “She said she wanted to look at the ballroom to get some idea of how she might decorate the tables.”
“Did anybody notice when Mrs. Jensen left or how long she was gone?” The chief made the question sound like an accusation.
Nobody spoke. Finally I said, “I don’t know when she left, but she came back in here as I went out.”
“She told me she didn’t feel well and was going home,” MayBelle added.
I had the feeling most of the women were holding their breath.
“I saw her come out the front door and look around, then she went right back in,” Cindy volunteered. “Then right before I came in, she ran down the steps to her car.”
The chief raised his eyebrows. “None of you knows if she went to the ladies’ room?”
We all shook our heads. He stood there turning all that over in what passes for his mind. Finally he came to the conclusion I’d expected him to reach all along. “What it boils down to”—his sharp polecat gaze flickered as he looked straight at me—“is that Mrs. Jensen needs to account for her time, Mrs. Walker Yarbrough has a stretch of time when she was supposedly out on the sidewalk in the streaming rain making a call but nobody saw her, and Judge Yarbrough found the body.”
That got Cindy and me a lot of glances we neither wanted nor needed, but they were nothing compared to the grief Joe Riddley would give me when I got home. There was no way he was going to admit it was his fault I’d found Willena.
The chief rolled smoothly on. “Mrs. Brandison, as the last person known to leave the ladies’ room before the judge found the body, are you certain Miss Kenan was alive at that point?”
MayBelle stood to her full height and gave him the look she gives contractors who don’t fulfill their contracts. “Very much alive. She told me to make sure Wilma saved her some crabmeat cheese puffs for her to eat tomorrow when . . .” The words
she felt better
hung over us.
“They all got eaten,” Wilma wailed — as if that made any difference now. After somebody dies, the strangest things pierce you.
“Mac was here when MayBelle came back in,” Gusta informed the chief, looking down her nose at him. “She was refilling her punch cup for the third time.”
Trust Gusta to have counted. Still, I appreciated it when she added, “Then she talked a long time with Grover Henderson and ate a couple of brownies. I saw her leave, and she wasn’t gone long enough to kill anybody.”
“It wouldn’t have taken long,” the chief assured her. He looked around at the group of women. “Who is this Grover Henderson, and where is he now?”
The entire group looked toward Wilma. She threw MayBelle a silent, piteous plea.
MayBelle had been taking charge of things all her life. She took charge of explaining Grover now. “He’s a stockbroker who comes down from Augusta to talk about investing each month. He left when the refreshment break was over. Since he has so far to drive and is a single parent with a teenage son, he has asked to be excused from the last part of the meeting, when we decide what to invest in. Nancy Jensen, our financial partner, usually calls him the next day and tells him what to buy for us.”
That was all true, but it didn’t tell Chief Muggins anything about the effect Grover had on women. He had come in that evening a little late. MayBelle had immediately sailed over to meet him and put a proprietary hand on his arm. As he went to the podium, Nancy Jensen — who sat on the front row — had let her skirt ride up to expose her big knees. Willena had stepped up to share whatever it was that made him laugh. Wilma sat through his whole presentation with a foolish simper on her face, then asked such a dumb question that anybody could tell she primarily wanted his attention. Willena had leaned over and whispered loudly, “Don’t go making such a fool of yourself.” Rachel had gone outside with him during the break, and I’d seen Sadie Lowe give him several of her special come-hither smiles. Only Gusta, Cindy, Meriwether, and I seemed unaffected by his charm.
“Can you give me his address and phone number?” Chief Muggins asked.
“Grover wouldn’t!” Wilma yelped. She turned and flung herself onto MayBelle, sobbing noisily. I didn’t particularly like Wilma, but I sincerely pitied her. Willena had been like a baby sister to her, and they were the last of the Kenans.
Even crusty old Gusta made a small grunt of compassion, while MayBelle patted Wilma’s shoulder and said, over and over, “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”
Chief Muggins hooked his thumbs in his belt. “At the moment I am leaning toward the conclusion that somebody slipped in while Mrs. Walker Yarbrough was down off the porch”—he put extra emphasis on those last three words—“and that we’ll find evidence of that on the scene. I know all of you ladies and where to find you. Please don’t leave town without checking with me. I’ll want to talk with some of you again tomorrow. Will that be acceptable?”
BOOK: Guess Who's Coming to Die?
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