When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (26 page)

I’d been doing some thinking while she was talking, and I had a question of my own. “You all didn’t stay up all night because you were afraid Hubert did it.”

She turned and looked at me for a while, like she was also thinking. At last she said, “You are smart, Mackie. Burlin always said you were. We—” She blinked several times, pressed one hand to her lips, and shook her head, warning me she couldn’t speak right then. She came back and sat down, and started drawing a little design on the tabletop with one finger. I couldn’t tell what it was, but she traced three of them before she swallowed hard and said, “We’re terrified they’re going to say Lance did it.”

That dammed my creek. I had to take several breaths before I could ask, “Why on earth would anybody think that? He didn’t even know who she was, did he?”

She nodded. “He admitted last night that Sperra sent him a note Monday afternoon, asking him to meet her at the water tank between eight thirty and nine that night. We all saw Annie Dale deliver it. We were meeting in a sitting room she’s let us work in. Lance read it and stuck it in a pile of papers he was working on. We figured it was from some gushing female—he gets a lot of those. We never imagined it was from her. We thought she was dead!”

“Why was he sure it was from her, then, and not an im poster?”

“He said she drew a little bird at the bottom, like this.” She reached for a pencil I keep near the table for doing the crossword and traced a design on her paper napkin: a figure eight lying on its side, with three V’s making a beak on the small end, a tail at the other, and two legs. “It was a joke between them when he was little. He could draw it by the time he was three. It stood for Sperra—sparrow.” Georgia shoved her manicured fingers through her bangs, leaving them in disarray. “I wish Burlin had never married her. We all begged him not to, the first time he brought her home. She came from a good family—her granddaddy was a senator—but her parents died when she was young, and she had all sorts of weird friends. Burlin met her when she was singing in a nightclub.”

“I thought he said it was a folk club.”

She gave a slight, one-shoulder shrug. “Same difference. She was earning her keep strumming a guitar. She wore long hippy skirts and hair down to her backside, and she looked and talked like Mother Earth. None of us could see what Burlin saw in her.” She frowned at me. “Frankly, I think he was still on the rebound from you.”

I refused to take the blame for whomever Burlin had married. “She looked all right in the videos they showed last night. Short hair, nice clothes—”

Georgia’s lip curled. “Oh, she cleaned up pretty good. And she’d grown up in political circles, so she knew how to behave—when she wasn’t drinking. We figured out later that must have started while Burlin was in the Georgia legislature, a couple of years before Lance was born. It’s a miracle he wasn’t born with fetal alcohol syndrome—although, to give Sperra credit, she tried to be good while she was pregnant. I always thought the reason she didn’t want any more children, though, was that she couldn’t bear to give up liquor for nine months again. Oh, why am I going on like this? The poor woman is dead. Whatever she did, it’s over. But she put Burlin through years and years of hell, and now Lance—Lance—”

I shoved the coffeepot her way. “Have some more.”

She shook her head. “I’m over my limit already. And I really ought to be going, or they’ll be sending the police looking for me.” She stood up and reached for her raincoat.

“But you haven’t finished the story. What happened when Lance met her Monday night?”

“He didn’t. Hubert asked them to stay after the meeting, remember? There were a lot of people who wanted to talk, so by the time Lance got home, it was past nine. He says he went to his room and read.” She headed for the front door.

“Did anybody see him come back to the inn? Annie Dale, for instance?”

She paused. “He stopped by Abigail’s room for a minute, I think. But he can’t prove he didn’t swing by the tank before he went home. Nobody was with him.” She gave a little laugh that wasn’t the least bit funny. “For that matter, none of us can prove we hadn’t recognized Sperra, or where we were when she died. Renée and I were lost in the wilds of Hopemore. Burlin stopped by the inn to change clothes before he went out with some guys, but nobody saw him, so he can’t prove he didn’t nip out and kill Sperra while he was there.”

“What about Edward and Binky—I mean Abigail?”

She gave me the first real laugh I’d heard from her all morning. “She told me she’d asked you to call her that. That darned kid just won’t grow up. She was probably the only child in history to give herself a nickname—that’s how she said ‘Abigail’ when she was two, and Burlin and I started calling her that, to tease her. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t answer to anything else. She didn’t become Abigail again until she went to work for Burlin, and he and I insisted. He didn’t want a secretary named Binky. But I think she secretly calls herself Binky still.” Her spirits seemed lighter as she opened the front door, then turned back once more for what Mama used to call “some tarrying talk.”

“I forgot to answer your question. Abigail was working in our sitting room all evening, and Edward drove straight from the meeting to Augusta, to meet with some members of Lance’s committee there. They had to finalize details for the rally the next evening. Lance was supposed to go with him. Edward was mad as blazes that he wouldn’t, and now we all wish he had. But I doubt if either Edward or Abigail can prove they were where they say they were, any more than the rest of us can.” She rubbed one cheek with her hand and heaved a sigh that came from her toes. “Who knew we all ought to document our every move? You don’t expect something like this.”

I got myself to my feet and reached for my walker to see her out. “But like you said, nobody commits a crime without leaving evidence. The police are probably sifting every square inch of dirt by now. What about Annie Dale? Can she help alibi anybody? Has Chief Muggins even talked to her?” Probably so. Since this was now a story worthy of national attention, Charlie would be interviewing everybody with any connection to the newsworthy Bullocks.

Georgia nodded. “Last night. But she wasn’t home Monday night. She’d told us earlier that since we wouldn’t need dinner, she was going to spend the evening with somebody with the improbable name of Smoke.”

“Not smoke, it’s S-m-o-a-k,” I told her. “Smoak Wilson is her mother-in-law. She’s ninety, but spry as can be. Annie Dale goes over there a couple of evenings a week.”

“It’s too bad Monday happened to be one of them.” Georgia usually had excellent posture, but right then, her body drooped in weariness. “Well, I’d better be going. I didn’t think you could help us, but I promised Abigail I’d deliver the letter. Oh—I almost forgot!” She dragged it from her pocket again and handed it to me. It was limp and a little damp, addressed to “MacLaren C. Yarbrough” in a sprawling hand.

I opened it and read two scrawled sentences: “Mackie, we need you to help us, please. Can you come see me this morning?”

I shook my head. I was saying, “I really can’t think of a single way I can help you,” when Georgia finally lost her excellent control.

Tears filled her big gray eyes, and her shoulders shook with sobs. She leaned her head against the doorjamb and bawled. I hopped to the tissues by the couch and put one in her hand. It left smears of mascara down both cheeks. “I can’t bear this, Mackie.” Her words came out in gasps. “I can’t! To get this close—this close—to the governor’s mansion and lose it because of a homeless drunk!” She scrubbed her eyes again, but still they poured tears. “Lance has worked so hard. We all have. But if this thing doesn’t get solved soon—” She ran out of words and could only shake her head. She reached out and clasped one of my hands with a valiant attempt to smile, then pulled up her hood and dashed out into the rain.

It was falling harder now, heaven’s tears covering the sad streets of Hopemore.

Near the sidewalk, Georgia picked up my paper, then ran back through the rain to thrust it at me. “Here. But I doubt it’s worth getting run over for.”

As she hurried away, anybody seeing that silver raincoat might think the moon had dropped by our place for a visit. To me, it looked like one big teardrop.

I was relieved I hadn’t made the front page. All the Bullocks had, though, standing in the same tableau that had appeared on the eleven o’clock news. I was about to lay the paper down when I thought to turn the page.

There I was, under the headline “Old sweetheart offers condolences.” It looked for all the world like Burlin and I were about to embrace.

21

I didn’t care if Joe Riddley was grumpy that early. I didn’t care if he would be more mellow after he ate. I snatched up the paper and hopped down the hall at record speed. Shoving his legs over, I sat down beside him. “Joe Riddley? Wake up. I have to tell you something.”

He muttered from beneath the covers.

“Wake up.” I shook his shoulder.

He didn’t bother to open his eyes. “Is the house on fire?”

“No.”

“Has somebody gone to the hospital?”

“No. But—”

“Is somebody dead?”

“You’re gonna be dead if you don’t wake up and listen to me. I have to tell you something.” I shook him again.

“Will I like it?”

“No, you won’t.”

“Then wait until I’ve had my breakfast.” With a mighty heave, he turned his back toward me, practically pitching me off the bed straight onto my bum leg.

I scrabbled back up and wiggled to make him give me sitting room. “I can’t. I have to tell you
now
.” If I didn’t, my courage would desert me.

He heaved a sigh and turned back over, again jerking the covers from beneath me and nearly spilling me onto the floor. He put both our pillows behind his head and shoved himself up so he was propped and comfortable. “This had better be good.”

“It’s not. It’s terrible.” Tears clogged my throat. “It’s—I don’t know how to begin.”

He glowered. “You wake me up at dawn to tell me something that is so infernally important it can’t wait, then you don’t know how to begin? How about, ‘I’m sorry I woke you up, honey—why don’t you go back to sleep’?”

I took a deep breath. “How about, ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t faithful to you after you left me up at college?’ Or ‘I did date Burlin Bullock for a while up there. Can you ever forgive me’?”

He punched the pillow behind him to get more comfortable. Then he closed both eyes and didn’t say a word for two hundred years.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated desperately. “I wish it hadn’t happened.” I also wished I hadn’t said anything. I wouldn’t have, dang it, if Burlin hadn’t come to town. I’m not one of those fools who think married people ought to tell their partners everything. That may make
them
feel better, but it generally makes the partners miserable.

About as miserable as I felt waiting for him to speak.

But I couldn’t have let him find out from somebody else.

I hardly breathed until he finally stretched, yawned, and forced his eyes to open. “Okay. Now I’m awake. But for the life of me, I don’t see why you couldn’t have waited another hour after waiting all these years.” He covered his mouth to yawn again, then gave me an approving nod. “So it was Burlin Bullock. Good taste, Little Bit.”

I gaped at him. “What do you mean, ‘
It
was Burlin Bullock’? Did you think there was somebody?”

He rubbed his chin, and his whiskers made a whispering sound in the room. “I figured there had to be. You went to college that fall kissing like a girl. You came home for Thanksgiving kissing like a woman. You hadn’t learned that from me.”

If he’d punched me in the stomach, it would have had the same effect. “You never said a word.”

“What was there to say? Either you’d come back to me or you wouldn’t. Didn’t seem to be a thing I could do about it except wait.”

I huffed. “You could have come to see me. You could have written or called sometimes to say you loved me.”

He nodded. “I could have. Should have. I would now, but I wasn’t grown up then. Mama told me I shouldn’t neglect you while I was paying for that ring.” He rubbed it gently, his finger warm on mine. “But I didn’t want to ask you to marry me carrying a load of debt.”

I felt sadder than a hound dog on full moon night. I laid my hand on the one that was stroking my ring. “I never loved him. You need to know that. And if you’d paid me the slightest attention that fall—” I jerked my hand away and swivelled around to face him straight on. “Wait a minute. When you came to my hospital room that night, the way you kissed me took my breath away. You didn’t learn that from
me.
”

He gave me a smug smile. “What’s sauce for the goose—”

I raised my fist. “I’ll goose you! Who was she? It wasn’t Annie Dale, was it?”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me toward him. “I’ll never tell. It never meant a thing. Maybe we both needed a comparison, to be sure we had what we really wanted.”

“But—” I felt my lower lip quiver. The idea of Joe Riddley with somebody else shocked me to my very soul.

He wrapped me in both arms and whispered into my hair, “How about if I forgive you and you forgive me? Will that be all right? And we don’t need to ever mention it again?”

I nodded. “But we’ll probably have to see Burlin around town until they leave. He’s making a perfect nuisance of himself.”

He nuzzled my neck. “You think he’s a nuisance? I’ll show you a nuisance. Take off those wet clothes. I don’t know where you have been, but you are soaking my covers.”

That’s all you need to know about that, except that as I was hopping out of the room later to make more coffee, I saw the paper lying on the floor and remembered why I’d gone in there in the first place. I stopped at the door. “You also need to know there’s another picture of me in the paper, but it’s not what it looks like. I was pushing Burlin away.”