Thoroughly 10 - What Are You Wearing to Die? (6 page)

Farrell gestured toward a glass case that held a tiny fawn peering down at its reflection in a mirror pond. The deer looked alive enough to start nibbling the silk grass around its hooves. “You gonna enter this in competition, Trevor?” It was an obvious attempt to distract Wylie.

Trevor didn’t respond.

“Trevor!” Farrell said sharply. “I asked if you’re still going to the trade show and if you plan on entering Starr’s fawn.” He explained to those of us who didn’t know, “Starr found that baby dead in the woods last spring and brought it home for her daddy to fix up pretty.”

“He finished it last week,” Wylie added. “She never even saw it.”

“Wylie!” Farrell exclaimed in rebuke.

It had taken that long for Trevor to register what Farrell had asked him. He shook his big head. “I probably won’t go to the show. Doesn’t much matter anymore.”

“I wouldn’t cancel yet,” Farrell advised. “It’s not until February. You might change your mind.”

One of the men whose name I didn’t know boasted to the others, “I’m hoping to get me a buck this fall that he can enter.”

Not to be outdone, Farrell said, “I’ve about persuaded Robin to put in her fox and rabbit. That girl is good, ain’t she, Trevor?”

“Good at getting her own way,” Wylie muttered, but Farrell had the floor and no intention of yielding it.

“She can stuff anything. I’m of a mind to take her my wife and ask her to stuff the old bag in a nagging position. That way she’d look real natural.”

Everybody laughed until they remembered why we were there. They hushed at once, and gave Trevor quick, embarrassed looks.

Trevor gave no sign of hearing. His head had sunk on his chest and he was staring at the rug again.

“Wylie?” Farrell persisted. “Robin’s good, ain’t she?”

“I guess.” Wylie was still working that hangnail. It would be bleeding soon if he didn’t leave it alone.

“Did she ever do taxidermy before, or did you teach her everything she knows?” another man asked. Somebody else snickered. Wylie swung around with fire in his eye.

Farrell made a shushing motion with his hand and spoke as if to a deaf or mentally impaired person. “Trevor, Vic wants to know if you all trained Robin or if she already knew something about taxidermy when she got here.”

The words took a while to percolate to Trevor’s brain. He roused himself with a visible effort. “She was trained before she got here. That’s why I hired her.”

“She’s got a natural talent for it,” Farrell told the rest of us. “That fox is one of the prettiest things you ever saw. Looks like he could come over and lick your fingers.”

“Chew ’em off, more likely,” I contributed.

Bradley stirred in his granddaddy’s arms at the sound of my voice. I bent to say softly, “Hey, Bradley? I brought you some spaghetti.”

Trevor gave the boy a little shake. “You awake, boy?”

Bradley opened drowsy blue eyes. I wondered if somebody had given him something to sedate him. Then he saw me and his eyes flew open. “Me-Mama!” He held out his arms and struggled to climb off his grandfather’s lap.

I bent and gathered him into my own arms. He nearly choked me, he held on so tight.

“That’s what my grandchildren call me. He learned it from Cricket,” I explained over his head to the puzzled men. I didn’t bother to add that children in foster care are quick to give foster parents and grandparents family titles, as if trying to establish that they have a right to be there. It always breaks my heart how fast a foster child will call a strange woman Mama.

“You doing okay?” I murmured to Bradley.

“Yes, ma’am.” His face was as pretty as his mama’s used to be, but that night both face and voice were colorless. “I’m a norphan. Did you know that? Norphans are boys who don’t have a mama or daddy, and my mama went to heaven without me.”

“I know she did, honey, but she didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.” I cuddled him for a while, then put my lips close to his ear and whispered, “I brought you some spaghetti.”

“I doesn’t want pasketti. I want my mama.”

“I know, baby, and I wish I could have brought her to you. But maybe you’ll get hungry later.” I raised my voice a tad. “Why don’t you ask your granddaddy if he’ll let you come play with Cricket one afternoon next week?”

His blue eyes shifted from my face to Trevor’s with a faint flicker of interest. “Can I, T-daddy?” He snuggled up to me, his breath as sweet and warm as milk.

“We’ll see.” Trevor sounded wrung out and bone weary.

“I’d better be going for now. I’ll see you later, Bradley.” I gave him a squeeze, then lowered him into his grandfather’s waiting arms. Trevor drew him close.

“Thank you for coming, Judge,” he mustered the energy to say. “I appreciate all that Ridd and Martha did for Bradley here.”

“They were glad to do it. He’s a great kid—aren’t you, Bradley?”

“No, ma’am. I’m a norphan.”

With a clatter of feet, Robin’s older daughter came running in. “Bradley? Bradley!” I got the impression she generally ran, yelling ahead to warn folks she was coming.

Her younger sister sidled in behind her, giving the room a nervous glance. I figured she must be around three, and shy. The hair curling to her shoulders was the color of a penny, her eyes like chocolate. She took a thumb out of her mouth to say something softly to a man by the door.

He looked startled. “Not tonight, honey.” He moved uneasily on his feet.

The elder sister shrieked, “Bradley! Missy brought bubbles! Come on!” The air seemed to vibrate with her high little voice. She grabbed at him and danced in impatience beside Trevor’s chair. I am generally opposed to medicating children, but that one looked like she could use something to calm her down. I pitied Robin, having to deal with her all day.

The younger sister put a gentle hand on Bradley’s. “Come blow bubbles wif us?”

He looked up at this granddaddy uncertainly. “I like bubbles.”

Trevor asked Robin’s older girl, “Will Missy be watching out for you all?”

“Mama’s out there.” She pranced in her eagerness to be off.

“Then go find the bubbles.” Trevor set Bradley down. The older girl tugged his hand, pulling him in her wake. The other sister trotted behind. I was glad I didn’t have the raising of them.

Trevor’s eyes followed the children.

I touched his shoulder. “I’ll be going now, but you know how sorry we are.”

He put his hand over mine and pressed it. “Thank you for coming. Take care, now.”

“You take care.” I slipped away. As soon as I was out of the room, I heard Wylie’s voice raised in anger again.

Joe Riddley was munching a sandwich in the small living room while talking with Maynard and Selena Spence, Hubert’s son and daughter-in-law. Maynard had abandoned a rising career as an art historian in New York City to come home and take care of his daddy when Hubert had his heart attack. Afterwards, Maynard had stayed in town, revived our tiny Hopemore historical museum, bought and restored a lovely Victorian home, and eventually bought Gusta’s antebellum house and started an antique business that was building a nationwide reputation. He had married Selena, a newcomer who worked as a nurse with Martha, and they seemed settled in Hopemore for at least the rest of his daddy’s life.

I was surprised to see them at Trevor’s, though. Maynard didn’t hunt or fish, and he was a good ten years older than Starr, so I couldn’t imagine how he knew the Knights.

“You find Trevor in there?” Joe Riddley asked. When I nodded, he went to pay his respects.

I turned to Selena and Maynard. “Where have you been keeping yourselves? Haven’t seen you all for at least a week.” Having helped to raise Maynard and gotten them out of a spot of trouble on their honeymoon,
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I loved them almost like my own.

Maynard was his usual good-looking self, his blond ponytail confined by a black ribbon that matched a black shirt he wore with gray pants. I doubted that he had dressed for the occasion. Having lived in New York, he tended to wear arty clothes. Selena, like Robin’s younger daughter, had red curls, but hers looked dimmed that evening and her freckled face was pale beneath them. “I’ve been puny this week, so Maynard has been looking after me.”

Without thinking, I glanced down at her stomach.

“No, I am not pregnant. People have been asking me that all day. I had a stomach virus, that’s all.” She turned on her heel and marched toward the kitchen.

I gave Maynard an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry. I guess we’re all waiting for an announcement from you two.” Since Maynard grew up eating cookies in my kitchen, I felt I could talk to him like a son.

He colored up. “You may be waiting for a long time. We’re not having any luck in that department, and it’s got Selena on edge.”

I changed the subject. We chatted until I saw Joe Riddley headed my way. “Please tell Selena how sorry I am,” I requested. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”

Joe Riddley hooked me around the neck. “You got anybody else you want to upset, or are you ready to go?”

The children were on the front walk, blowing bubbles under the supervision of a tall, sturdy woman with thick glasses and black hair that flowed over her shoulders in an unruly mane. She must be at least twenty, but had the unfinished look of a young teenager.

Robin sat on the bottom step, watching them. As we passed her, I said, “I’m sorry about your truck.”

She swiped back a tendril of loose hair behind her ear. “Me, too. I had a six-year loan on that thing, and the folks down in Dublin say I’ll have to pay it off, even though the truck was totaled. They say I owe five thousand dollars more than they’re allowing me on it. Can they really make me pay on a truck I no longer have?”

“I’m afraid they can. Those six-year loans are nothing except one more way to lure folks into buying what they can’t afford.”

Joe Riddley put a hand on my elbow to remind me not to get on a soapbox and preach at somebody who was already converted. “Go talk to Laura MacDonald over at MacDonald Motors,” he suggested to Robin. “She might have something on her used-car lot she can let you have at a reasonable price.”

Robin sighed. “I sure hate to pay for something I’m not getting to use.”

I felt a tug on my pants leg and looked down into the pleading face of her three-year-old. “I like you. Can I go home with you?”

I gently detached her hand. “You don’t even know me, honey, and you’d miss your mama and your sister.”

She flicked a glance toward her mother, then turned back to me. “Can I come play at your house for a little while?”

“Not tonight. Maybe another time.”

What made me say that? If I took one child, I’d have to invite them both, and I wasn’t sure our house could survive her hyperactive sister.

Neither Joe Riddley nor I slept well that night. We tossed, turned, and lay awake discussing how dreadful it would be to lose a child or a grandchild and how much our hearts went out to Trevor. My pillow was wet and soggy by the time we’d finished. When I shifted my head over onto Joe Riddley’s, it was damp, too.

I got up and fetched fresh ones from the guest room bed, then went to the kitchen and got myself a glass of cold water. As I climbed back between the sheets, I noticed the clock. “It’s five—hardly worth trying to sleep. We’ll have to get up in a couple of hours.”

Joe Riddley was already snoring.

I lay there with my thoughts going round and round. Why had Starr left her daddy’s house when they had been getting along so well? Was that before or after she went off the wagon? Why had she gone off the wagon, anyway, after so many years of staying clean? Where had she been going, dressed like that?

Knowing that thoughts, like the sky, are apt to be darkest in the hour before dawn, I forced myself to stop thinking and belatedly kept my promise to the deputy. I prayed that Buster and his deputies would find whoever did that dreadful deed. I prayed for Trevor, and for Bradley. Remembering a police sergeant I’d once met who said she always prayed for the safety of her city when she was in charge of the homicide squad for the night—and that the city had never had a murder on her watch—I prayed for the safety of everybody in Hope County. And I prayed the prayer I often had—which had sometimes gotten me into trouble in my marriage: “If there’s something I ought to be doing, show me what it is.”

Instead of a blinding revelation, all I could think of was Starr’s clothes. Why on earth had she been dressed so somberly when she died? Who might know?

I couldn’t ask Trevor, but Evelyn might remember who Starr’s friends had been. I fell asleep in the middle of telling myself that Joe Riddley couldn’t accuse me of meddling if I was simply asking about the victim’s clothes.

The news about how Starr died spread like flies. Hopemore was terrified. By Saturday morning, foot traffic in town was nil. I heard from the few customers who came by that parents weren’t letting their children go to friends’ houses and were setting up parent patrols at soccer and football games. Young mothers gave up jogging or riding bikes with infants in three-wheeled rickshaws. Few women played golf or tennis that weekend. Deputies reported that law enforcement phone lines were clogged with calls from people who heard noises outside their homes or noticed somebody acting strange.

As you might imagine, Joe Riddley kept a close eye on me. Autumn Saturdays are busy down at the nursery, with homeowners coming by for plants to put in over the weekend. Usually he works there while I pay bills and catch up on paperwork. That morning he stuck around the office reading seed catalogs with the same passion I bring to a good mystery. I was impatient for him to leave, so I could call Evelyn in to talk to her about Starr’s friends.

Lulu dozed at my feet. Bo stalked along the top of the curtain rod, darting looks to see if I was watching. “You poop on that curtain, you are dead meat,” I warned.

“I love you. I truly do,” he replied.

I was fantasizing about an appropriate revenge for Joe Riddley’s Thursday prank when Hubert Spence came in, beaming like he had won the Georgia lottery. Behind him, Evelyn was clutching fistfuls of hair and shaking her head to signify “I tried to keep him from bothering you, but I couldn’t.”

I motioned her back to work. Nobody can stop Hubert.

He bounced into the office with his hand outstretched, and the way he pumped Joe Riddley’s, you’d have thought they hadn’t seen each other for years instead of at Rotary a few days before. “Hey, ole buddy. How ya doin’?” Without waiting for a reply, he turned to me. “And how you doin,’ Judge? Is that a new outfit?”

“Relatively.” I had treated myself to a celery green pantsuit at the end-of-summer sales. It was possible Hubert hadn’t seen it.

“You’re looking good. Real good.”

He looked pretty good himself. Not as handsome as Joe Riddley, of course, who inherited high cheekbones, straight dark hair, and an olive complexion with a tinge of red under the skin from his Cherokee grandmother. Still, Hubert was more than passably good-looking. Before Gusta had agreed to let him live in the same house with her, she had insisted that he bathe regularly, a habit he’d given up after his wife died. Once he got cleaned up, he started paying attention to what he wore and how he cut his hair. He had squired a congressman’s sister around the year before, and that past month I had heard a couple of widows talking like Hubert was worth a second look.

“The world treatin’ you all right?” he asked me, still beaming.

“World’s treating me fine.” I eyed him warily. I couldn’t think of a single reason for him to leave his store and come see us at work. Although we had been good neighbors for thirty-five years—Joe Riddley had harvested Hubert’s watermelons and fed his cows while he was laid up with his heart attack several years back, and Hubert and his son, Maynard, had been real helpful to me in the weeks after Joe Riddley got shot
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—we had never been drop-in friends. The men had serious differences that were only partially due to the fact that Joe Riddley went to Georgia and Hubert to Georgia Tech. They had yet to agree on football, religion, or politics.

Hubert started toward the wing chair, then aimed a suspicious look at the curtain rod, which was directly over the chair.

“Back off! Give me space!” Bo taunted him.

“Come,” Joe Riddley commanded, holding out his arm. Bo flew down to perch on it, then sidestepped up to Joe Riddley’s shoulder and sat bobbing his head, waiting to be entertained.

Hubert sat down on the front edge of the chair, a man with something important to say. If he’d smiled any wider he’d have split his jaw.

“You want a Coke?” Joe Riddley offered.

“No, thanks, I’m fine.” He rubbed his palms together. “You all likin’ your new house and all? Don’t miss the old place?”

He was talking about the small brick house we’d bought in town when we’d deeded the old place to Ridd. Moving after all those years takes a while to get used to, so Joe Riddley ignored the questions. “Why don’t you let us in on the secret of what brings you to our office on this fine day?”

Hubert crossed one stubby calf over the other thigh and beamed from one of us to the other. “I have made a momentous decision, and I wanted you folks to be the first to know.”

Joe Riddley and I both swiveled our chairs around so we could see him more easily.

“You gonna marry Gusta?” Joe Riddley hazarded.

Since Gusta was nearly twenty years older than Hubert, I figured that wasn’t likely. “You gonna sell your store and retire?” I guessed.

Spence’s Appliances had been hit even harder than we had by the opening of the big-box superstore on the edge of town. Folks in small towns don’t need a lot of major appliances, so most of Hubert’s business had come from selling radios, televisions, razors, blenders, and the like. He didn’t have the volume to be able to compete with big-box prices.

“Nope and nope.” He wore the smug smile of somebody who knows the right answer. His voice dropped a notch, into the realm of his normal grumble. “I’d rather marry a mosquito than Gusta. They have a lot in common, now that I think about it. Both drive you crazy and go straight for the jugular. And who’d want to buy my store? So I’m not getting married and I’m not retiring—not exactly. I’ve decided to go into another line of business.” He looked from one of us to the other, priming our pumps for the revelation. “I am going to run for mayor. And since you now live inside the city limits, you can vote for me.”

He sat back in the wing chair and waited for applause—or maybe a campaign contribution.

It took all the self-discipline I possessed not to shriek, “You are what? Of all the tomfool notions I ever heard, that’s the dumbest.”

I don’t want to distress those who might belong to Hubert’s party, but Hubert’s politics were 90 percent rant and 10 percent rave. No government ever did anything right as far as he was concerned, and his solutions were generally predicated not on what was best for the majority of citizens but entirely on what was best for Hubert.

“What led you to this momentous decision?” Joe Riddley spoke in a milder voice than I could have managed.

Hubert scrunched up his eyes, a sign he was about to get serious and hateful—which, with Hubert, was often the same thing. “That damfool woman talking about running. She wasn’t raised in Hopemore. What does she know about being mayor of the place?”

“Which woman is that?” Joe Riddley’s voice was still mild as sweet milk.

“Nancy Jensen. She ain’t never been anything but a housewife, and she was born and raised in Waycross. She ain’t been in town more than ten years.” Hubert thought it cute to talk like a hick at times, even though he had an engineering degree and had made straight As in English all through school.

“She was a chemistry teacher for years before she married Horace,” I pointed out, “and she’s been here at least fifteen years. Their son, Race, is fourteen.”

“Okay, fifteen. That doesn’t make her an expert on the place. What does she know about running a town?”

I knew I ought to show the same restraint Joe Riddley had, but I figured Nancy knew at least as much about running Hopemore as Hubert did. She had chaired every club in town, was an elder in the First Presbyterian Church, and had put on the golf club dance the previous summer. I had served with her on several committees, and felt she had perfectly good administrative skills.

However, while I would certainly vote for Nancy over Hubert, I had better manners than to tell him so—until he added, “She couldn’t even keep her husband at home, and now she’s trying to take everything he’s worked all his life to build.” His voice was full of spite.

Hubert’s take on the facts was close enough to make trouble for Nancy in an election.
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Her husband
had
run off with another woman back in July—although it was a woman he’d been involved with, off and on, since he was fifteen—and in the divorce Nancy
was
being represented by an excellent lawyer who argued that a corporate executive’s wife who gave up her career in order to help advance his deserved more than half of their joint assets. The lawyer argued that Nancy had sacrificed her own earning potential to increase Horace’s, so his ability to earn more was an intangible family asset that needed to be factored into the final financial settlement. I agreed with the reasoning, although in this particular case, Horace’s ability to earn money came from the fact that his granddaddy founded Middle Georgia Kaolin, which Horace now ran.

In any case, I was not willing to hear Hubert bad-mouth a woman because her husband had abandoned her. “The divorce needn’t keep her from being a good mayor,” I said. “In fact, it could make her a better one, since she will have plenty of time to devote to the job.”

“She got arrested a while back, too, didn’t she?” he demanded. “Shootin’ up a motel? We don’t need criminals running this town.”

“Those charges were dropped. Don’t you go bringing them up in your campaign.”

Hubert was turning pinker by the second.

“Which makes you madder?” Joe Riddley asked him, still keeping calm. “That she wasn’t born here or that she’s a woman?”

“Both. No offense, Mac, but you get a woman in power? Next thing you know, everything’s gone all touchy-feely. As you both know, I ain’t one for touchy-feely, so I’ve decided if you want something done right, maybe you’d better do it yourself.”

The scary thing was, Hubert might have a chance. Our incumbent had said he wouldn’t run again, and we had never elected a woman mayor. Also against Nancy was that she was a middle-aged woman who thought things through before she spoke. Hubert had that shallow friendliness that has been the hallmark of too many Southern politicians who get elected decade after decade not on the strength of their intelligence but on connections, a handshake, and a smile. He would have another advantage, too. While it shames me to admit it, we still have a lot of voters in Hope County who can’t read. When they got to the polls and saw “Spence” on the ballot, they might simply vote for a combination of letters they recognized from the sign on his store.

For the moment, I had said my say. Joe Riddley could have the last word. “It’s a mighty big decision,” he said. “You sure you want to do this? You know how the newspapers are. They’ll dig up every bit of dirt they can find.”

Hubert waved that away with one pudgy hand. “I ain’t worried about the paper. Slade Rutherford can dig all he likes. He won’t find anything in my past worse than a little watermelon stealing when we were boys.”

I abandoned my vow of silence. “And water tower painting in high school.”

“Well, yeah, boys will be boys.”

I was fixing to point out that that particular boy had painted Joe Riddley’s name and mine inside a four-foot heart for the whole town to read, but Joe Riddley beat me off the mark. “Are you sure you want the responsibility for running this town? There’s not much money in it. What’s the salary, six or seven thousand dollars?”

“Something like that.”

“And you’d have to give up the store and spend a lot of time listening to people’s gripes.”

“The store is gonna die on its feet anyway, and I figure it’s better to listen to other people’s gripes and do things right for a change, than spend my time griping that other folks are doing them wrong.” Hubert had given the decision at least half an hour’s thought.

When Joe Riddley nodded, I knew he wasn’t endorsing Hubert, merely agreeing with his sentiment. “Have you talked to Maynard about it?” he asked.

I suspected Maynard would not be pleased if his daddy jeopardized his hard-won health by getting het up about a political campaign—especially since Hubert and Maynard perched on opposite sides of the political fence.

“I haven’t mentioned it to him quite yet. I wanted to test the idea out on you folks first.”

If he hoped we’d reconcile Maynard to the idea, he had another think coming. However, Joe Riddley said in a voice as quiet as the day outside, “I wish you luck. You got yourself a manager and the campaign all mapped out?”

“It’s early days. I’ll bet that Jensen woman won’t start campaigning till mid-October.”

Why should she? A candidate could easily reach our entire electorate in three weeks.

Hubert slicked back his hair. “I don’t think I’ll need a manager. I’m a pretty good manager myself. I do need a catchy slogan, though. If you think of something, let me know.”

Joe Riddley nodded again. “We sure will.” An awkward silence fell. No way we were going to promise Hubert we’d vote for him or write him a check.

He bounced to his feet. “Well, I wanted you all to know. I’ll be getting back to you when I’ve got signs printed and all. Remember, with Hubert at the helm, this town will return to decency and old-time values.” He shook our hands like we were perfect strangers, then bounced out in search of new victims.

“Sic ’em!” Bo called after him.

I waited until Hubert was out of earshot before I asked, “Can you think of anything worse for this town than Hubert at the helm? It would be like turning the clock back fifty years.”

“A hundred, more like. Let’s hope somebody runs against him who actually has a chance of winning.”

“You don’t think Nancy has a chance?”

“Afraid not. Hubert has her image pegged nicely. In spite of the fact that Horace has been playing around and the shooting charges against her were dropped, during an election all folks will remember is that she got arrested and couldn’t hold on to her husband. Besides, who would want to get on the bad side of Horace? He can be a tad abrasive.”

That was as critical as Joe Riddley would get, but the fact was, Horace had about as much charm as a wild boar. He also had more money than three-fourths of the town put together, and he knew how to use it to control people.