Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man? (31 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

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“You’re leaking!” Meriwether exclaimed, pointing at me.
“Oh, laws a mercy.” I held up my dripping plastic bag. “I brought you some stew and frozen vegetables. Now you’ll need to cook them tomorrow.”
Jed grabbed the food and took it to the kitchen. I looked ruefully at my lap. “I need to go, so I can get out of this sopping skirt.” But before I got up, the doorbell rang.
Meriwether peered through the lace sheers at her window. “It’s Nana and Slade. Don’t leave us, Mac. We need moral support.”
“I can’t answer the door like this.”
“Jed?” she called. “Can you get that?”
As he ushered them in, it was obvious that I was the only person in the room universally welcome. Jed and Slade carried in chairs from the dining room and each took his seat like he was prepared to wait the other out. Gusta opened battle as soon as she set a basket covered with a red napkin on the floor and settled her gray skirts to her satisfaction in the blue chair. “What is he doing here?” Only good breeding kept her from pointing at Jed.
“He brought me supper,” Meriwether replied cooly.
“I’ve brought you supper. Florine had meat loaf and I’ve brought you some.”
Slade rose to his feet. “Let me take that to the refrigerator, Augusta.”
Point to Slade. Jed would never be able to call Gusta by her given name if he lived to be a hundred. And, as I have said, nobody but Slade called her Augusta.
She gave him her wintry smile. “You are so
kind
, Slade.”
He sauntered into the kitchen like it was his house. “Do you need a glass of tea or anything while I’m here, honey?” he called.
Meriwether didn’t reply.
Gusta leaned from the wing chair and said softly, “I hope you aren’t encouraging
him
, dear.” She gave a slight sideways nod toward Jed, as if he couldn’t hear every word.
Jed stretched out on his chair and spread out his blue sock feet. “Oh, she’s been pretty encouraging, Miss Gusta. Pretty encouraging.” He clasped his hands behind his head and grinned.
Meriwether started to frown at him, then changed her mind and lifted her chin. “Jed and I are getting married the week before Christmas.” Oh, I was proud of her!
Slade, coming back from the kitchen, made a short strangled sound. Gusta sat like she’d turned to stone. Then she turned to me and asked, “How is dear Joe Riddley?”
“Dear Joe Riddley actually took five steps on his own this afternoon. But I don’t think that’s what Meriwether wants to talk about.”
“Meriwether is ill.”
Slade went to the couch and knelt beside her. He spoke so softly I had to strain my ears to hear. “You don’t have to marry him. I was going to ask you at Thanksgiving, but I’ll do it right here in front of everybody if that’s what you want.”
Meriwether shook her head and said, equally softly, “I’m sorry, Slade. But I’m going to marry Jed.”
“You can’t throw yourself away on him. I offer you my heart and my good name.”
I figured an interruption might be in order. “The Rutherfords from South Carolina?”
“North Carolina.” Gusta’s tone implied that I may be southern, but my family wasn’t exactly quality. Her gnarled hands clutched the arms of the chair so tightly that her veins stood out like wisteria.
Any family who survived the mosquitoes, malaria, heat, humidity, gnats, and boll weevils of early Georgia, as mine did, counts as quality, so I ignored her. “I believe Mr. Rutherford was raised in Orangeburg. Isn’t that right, Slade?”
Slade slid out from that like butter between hot pancakes. He stood and gave me a friendly nod. “That’s partly right. Daddy worked in Orangeburg for a while, and I was born down there.”
Jed waved Slade back to his seat. “Even if you were born in Buckingham Palace, Meriwether is going to marry me. And Miss Gusta knows everything there is to know about my lack of pedigree.” An impish grin creased his freckled face. Jed wasn’t anywhere near as handsome as Slade, but anybody would have to admit he was cute—with one notable exception.
The exception gave him a chilling stare. “I think you ought to be going.”
Jed leaned forward like he was about to tell Gusta a secret. “You’d better be nice to me, Miss Gusta. I’m fixing to endow your granddaughter with my good name, the purity of my heart, and all my worldly goods.”
“A parrot?” Her voice would have frozen poor Joe in two seconds flat.
“Oh, he’s got more than that.” I gave a grand wave. “He’s also got some books at my place that belonged to his grandmother.”
Jed’s blue eyes widened in surprise. “Virgil?” He sounded like he’d found an old friend.
“I think so. There’s also a book of poetry, a Latin grammar, and a couple of others. Your mother left them with us for you.”
“Then let’s go get them! Honey,” he said deliberately, leaning over Meriwether and giving her a conspiratorial smile, “this room is a bit full. I’ll go with Mac now and come back tomorrow. But hold fast to your courage, you hear me?”
She reached up and stroked his cheek. “It’s screwed to the mast.”
Jed squeezed her hand, then slipped on his loafers. “Ready, Mac?”
I said my good-byes and trotted after him down the walk. “I don’t know what your hurry is,” I grumbled. “Those books have been there fifteen years.”
“I wanted out of there. Besides, they are mine, right? And they were Mama’s?”
“They were your grandmother’s. Helena left them with us for you.” He was going to be disappointed when he saw what a pitiful legacy it was, but I was touched that he was that sentimental about his mother. “Follow me home, and don’t tailgate,” I commanded. “I can’t speed. I’m a judge.”
Darren was in our living room watching television. “J. R.’s fast asleep and Joe’s in the barn.” As he let himself out the back, the dogs didn’t even bark.
“Where are the books?” Jed looked around the kitchen like I kept them with the cookbooks.
“They’re in the study, and you’ll have to reach them. I certainly can’t.”
I pointed to the five books on the top shelf. “That red one, the two short ones in the middle, the big green one, and the poetry book at the end.”
He glanced at all the others, then held the Virgil like it was made of gold. “If you’re thinking that book is valuable,” I warned, “it’s not. None of them are that old.”
“I know, but Granny, Mama, and I all loved Virgil. Granny used to read him to me at bedtime. In Latin, before I was six.” His lips twisted in a sad smile. “Mama said Granny was a Latin teacher who fell for a man who looked like Paris of Troy but had no more brains than the horse. When did she give them to you?”
I touched the four books on the desk gently. “When she first found out she was dying. She brought them to the store and asked us to give them to you for your twenty-first birthday. Then you didn’t come home after that birthday, and we plumb forgot. I am so sorry.”
“Hey, it’s all right.” He stroked that old green book. “When Mama was dying, that very last morning, she was talking about this book. ‘Virgil,’ she’d say, turning her head back and forth on the pillow. ‘Mama’s Virgil.’ I went home at noon and turned the house upside down looking for it, but the only books I found besides my own were Hector’s girlie magazines.” Unconsciously he echoed his mother. “I figured Hector had used it to light fires. Then they called to say she was going, so I rushed back. I hadn’t thought about old Virgil for years.” He gave me a crooked, sad smile. “Like you and Gusta said, I don’t have much to offer Meriwether. But believe me, I’ll give her the moon if I can.”
“Just give her yourself, hon. That’s all she’s ever wanted. Back when I was in college I had a car accident, and that night Joe Riddley drove three hours and sweet-talked the nurses into letting him come in after hours. He bent over my bed and whispered, ‘Don’t scare me like that, Little Bit. You’re the only thing in the world I want.’ That was one of the sweetest things he ever said.” If I wasn’t careful, I was going to get maudlin.
Jed settled that with a grin. “Well, if I gave Meriwether the moon, Miss Gusta would just put me on it and send it back into orbit.” He hefted his books. “I’ll see you later. Sleep well.”
I went up to bed thinking that some things, at least, turn out better than we expect.
Others, of course, do not.
27
Meriwether called early the next morning. “Good morning, Mac. I need a favor.”
“Sure, what is it?”
“Could you go by Nana’s? She’s so upset she’s going to make herself sick.”
“I’ll go by after I take Joe Riddley to therapy. Is the wedding still on?”
For a girl with a bum leg, she was downright cheerful. “Of course!”
As I hung up, Joe Riddley reached for the log near his plate and laboriously read the page. “Says here ‘Go to therapy.’ Doesn’t say ‘go by’ or ‘have wedding.’ ”
“That’s your log, honey. If I kept a log, I’d need a book per day.”
He gave me a long look, then his face crinkled into his old Joe Riddley grin. “Don’t you be getting married, Little Bit. You’re already married.” He held out his arms, and I slid onto his lap for the first really good hug we’d had in ages. He rubbed his cheek on the top of my head like he used to. “I love you, Little Bit.”
“I love you, too, Joe Riddley.”
I got to Gusta’s to find Darren’s yellow Volkswagen backed up the drive, but I didn’t see him as Florine showed me to the sun porch, which was fitted with windows for winter. Gusta sat amid the floral cushions like a yard ornament in gray corduroy. Pooh sat in her wheelchair beside her. The day was cool, but the porch pleasant, warmed by the sun.
“That maple is particularly lovely this year,” I greeted them, gesturing to the view.
Pooh opened her blue eyes wide and beamed. “I was just saying the very same thing!”
Gusta smoothed her skirt. “Yes, some things in life are reliable.” She touched her hair, as if to reassure herself that every lacquered curl was in place. Whatever Gusta’s hairdresser did, her hairdos always lasted longer than anybody else’s.
“Meriwether asked me to come,” I told her. “She’s worried about you.”
Her old gray eyes were not angry, but bleak. “I cannot understand how she can throw herself away on Jed. It’s nothing more than a childhood infatuation. That’s all it ever was.”
I looked questioningly at Pooh.
“I’ve told her all about it. After all, Pooh is my oldest friend.”
Pooh pooched out her lips like she was thinking. “I don’t think you are right to call it an infatuation, dear. They’ve had a long time to think it over, and Jed has become a fine young man. If they still want one another—”
I jumped in to second that motion. “If Jed was a stranger who’d moved to town and showed up at church, you’d have been mighty proud for Meriwether to be seen with him.”
“I cannot forget he is a Blaine.” Seeing me make a sharp impatient move, Gusta held up one hand. “I am not quite the snob you think me. I had two cousins, sisters. One married a boy from a fine family who beat her until she died much too young. The other married a boy from very modest beginnings, but he was a good husband and she has been very happy. I would not mind if Meriwether merely wanted to marry out of her class.”
Pooh chortled. “You make us sound like an English country village.”
“In many ways, we are. We all know there are different circles in which people move. Sometimes people rise above their beginnings—I’ll grant you that.”
“Slade Rutherford has apparently managed,” I contributed.
Pooh leaned forward in distress. “I thought he was one of the
North Carolina Rutherfords.
” I doubted if Pooh had known there were North Carolina Rutherfords until Slade came to town, and I still wasn’t certain they existed except as a figment of Gusta’s imagination. But clearly, debunking him would crush Pooh almost as much as telling her the Queen of England was really only Elizabeth Smith.
Gusta must have thought the same thing, because she first asked, “Do you know that for a fact?” and then, before I could answer, she’d flapped her hand. “We’ll talk about that another time. You are perfectly right that if Jed Blaine had come here from another place and I had not known his family, I might have been proud for him to date Meriwether. But if I had afterward learned that his family for generations had been liars, thieves, and degenerates—”
Pooh pressed one plump hand to her chest. “Surely not degenerates, Gusta!”
Gusta pinched her lips together and drew herself up. “I have never told a soul, but my husband whipped Hector for trying to rape Helena when she was barely thirteen.”
“Oh, no!” Pooh was providing all the chorus Gusta needed. I sat back and listened.
“Oh, yes. Lamar found them in the cotton gin after closing one evening. He grabbed the boy by his collar, threw him to the ground, seized a piece of rope hanging on a post, and beat the tar out of him. The poor girl was so grateful she followed Lamar home. I gave her a bath in my own tub and found her some clean clothes, but I had to send her home. She had nowhere else to go. If we’d had a shelter then like we do now—” Now I realized why Gusta had worked so hard to build a shelter for abused women and children. I wanted to kick her, though, when she added, “For all we know, Jed is the product of Helena and one of her dreadful brothers.”

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