Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery (15 page)

He reached behind him and got a blanket we always carry. It was awkward to unfold it behind the wheel, but he managed, and he wrapped it around my shoulders. Then he leaned over and held me like he used to when we were courting teenagers. “Oh, Little Bit, Little Bit.”

I cried my heart out on his shoulder, surrounded by sixty years of love.

He handed me a box of tissues from the backseat. “You should have told me.”

“I just went to take her the cake. The back door was open—” I couldn’t go on.

“You still want to ride to Augusta?”

“A bargain is a bargain.”

He reached out and touched my cheek. “There’s nowhere I’d rather have you right now.”

“There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

 

We drove the long way around to avoid the accident near I-20, which meant following several timber trucks on two-lane roads. Joe Riddley’s not a speedy driver even on empty roads, so by the time we pulled into the Golden Years parking lot, it was well past eleven.

A stocky brunette shoved a visitor’s book our way with a pen. I noticed that Joe Riddley signed in without asking for the room number and headed for hall C. “Have you been to see him before?” I asked, trotting to keep up with his long legs.

“A time or two,” he acknowledged, “when I happened to be up this way.”

To have done a good deed and never mentioned it was typical of my husband.

When we got to the room, though, I thought Joe Riddley had made a mistake. Josiah Whelan was stout, with thick hair that sandy color that slides into gray. The bed was occupied by a shrunken old man with lifeless white hair and a face that had fallen in on itself. Then I saw his eyes—Edie’s eyes, which made something extraordinary out of ordinary faces. I also saw a plastic container beside his bed holding false teeth.

He lifted his right hand from the covers in greeting, but I couldn’t tell if he recognized us or was simply glad to see anybody at all.

Joe Riddley went over and clasped his good right hand. “Hey, buddy.”

Josiah squeezed his hand and grimaced in what I guessed was a smile.

Joe Riddley squeezed back. “MacLaren came to see you, too.”

I went to the other side of the bed and took his left hand. It was whispery and dry, a dead weight in mine. A believable smile was more than I could manage, so I bent and gave him a kiss on his forehead.

“Watch it, Josiah,” Joe Riddley warned. “Don’t you mess with my wife, you hear me?”

Josiah opened his mouth and made some noises accompanied by a vigorous nodding of his head. I couldn’t make out a single word in the sounds, but thought he was laughing. Josiah always liked a good laugh.

“Well, lookee who’s got comp’ny,” said a cheerful voice behind us. “You all sit down and visit a spell.” A large nurse in an aqua smock and white pants went to open the blinds so the sun warmed the room. Her short, untidy hair was an improbable blond, and her lipstick blurred around the edges of her thick mouth, but her touch was kind as she rested a hand on Josiah’s pillow. “You all have a good visit now.” She bustled out.

Josiah still clung to Joe Riddley’s hand like it was the edge of a life raft. With his other hand, Joe Riddley pulled up a chair close to the bed. I sat in a straight chair down at the bottom, where Josiah could see me if he cared to look.

The room was peaceful. Edie had tried to make it homey by putting pictures on the wall, including one of the Whelan homeplace and pecan grove. A Thanksgiving cactus spilled fuchsia blooms down a brass pot on the tiled windowsill, and a pothos in a whimsical frog pot curled down from the top of a built-in wardrobe. Still, the room had that smell of urine and age that is so hard to conceal in a home where incontinent people live and windows are never opened.

“Would you like some water?” Joe Riddley asked. When Josiah nodded, he gently steered a straw to the dry, cracked lips. When water dribbled down Josiah’s chin and onto his shirt, his lower lip quivered like he was about to cry.

“Don’t drown him,” I said crossly, getting up to fetch a white towel from a small stand beside the bed. As I dabbed Josiah’s damp chest, I pure-T
hated
to see an old friend like that. I hated worse feeling like a hypocrite, acting cheerful when we’d come with awful news. He was so pathetically glad to see us. I knew now why Edie made that two-hour drive every day. Not just because she needed to see him, but because of how much he enjoyed having her come.

I got up. “I want to see the nurse a minute.” I gave Joe Riddley a look that meant, “You tell him while I’m gone.” I never can tell how well he has read a look, but he nodded, so I hurried out. The aqua smock was disappearing into a room down the hall.

I propped against the wall and waited for her to come out.

“We aren’t here on a happy errand,” I informed her when she appeared. “Mr. Whelan’s daughter was killed last night, and the police asked us to let him know.”

“Oh, no!” Her hand flew to cover her mouth. No manicures for Mary O’Connell—the name on her badge. Her nails were bare, her fingers beginning to curve with arthritis. “Was it a car wreck? When she didn’t come yesterday, we wondered what had happened. She was so faithful to come every day.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t a wreck. She died at home, we heard.” I couldn’t go through the story again. She was sure to hear it on the evening news. “The reason I’m telling you is that Mr. Whelan will need some special attention these next few days.”

“Of course. Poor thing. It don’t seem fair, does it?” I thought she meant it was unfair for Edie to die before her daddy, but I’d underestimated her single-minded devotion to her patients. “He looked forward to her visits so much.” She sighed. “Of course, people are born to die, ’n’ I oughta be used to it by now, but you don’t ever get what I’d call real used to it. I’ll do what I can to lessen his pain.” She trudged down the hall, her heels rolling out and her pants tight over her ample hips.

Angels aren’t always thin and beautiful.

As I headed back to the room, a hoarse cry from Josiah’s room was followed by inarticulate shouts. Ms. O’Connell hurried down the hall on soundless feet, followed by two other members of the staff. She explained to them over one shoulder as they went, “His daughter died, and he’s all tore up about it.”

I went more slowly and found Josiah surrounded by people far more competent to help him than I. Joe Riddley slumped in his chair, wrung out and grieving at having hurt his friend. I went to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. He covered it with one of his.

Josiah writhed and moaned on the bed, shaking the side rail with his one good hand, grief ensnared within his damaged body.

“Get a posy,” Ms. O’Connell ordered. Somebody else left the room at a brisk trot. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a flower would help, until she returned with a white strait-jacket affair. Quickly they got Josiah into it and restrained him from harming himself.

Only his eyes moved now, wild and angry. I had the feeling he knew he was trapped in his useless body, understood everything that was happening, and raged at his own helplessness.

“I’ll bring him a sedative.” Ms. O’Connell hurried out, calm and efficient.

Joe Riddley bent over to touch Josiah’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry we had to bring you this bad news. We’re leaving now, but I’ll come back later in the week.”

Josiah tossed his head on the pillow. “Hey,” he said urgently. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said softly, touching his arm.

He rolled his head from side to side. “Hey! Eh—pee—eh—pee.”

“Edie?” I hazarded a guess. “You want to know what plans are being made for her? We’ll come back and tell you when we know.”

His head rolled frantically now. Furious eyes begged us to understand. “Pee. Pee. Pee!”

“Here.” An aide reached for the urinal and held it over his bed.

He knocked it from her hand and sent it flying across the room. “Oh! Pee. Hey! Hey!” He grew more and more agitated.

“Maybe you all ought to leave now and let us get him settled down.” Coming in with a needle, Mary O’Connell spoke pleasantly, but it was more than a suggestion.

As we started for the door, tears streamed down Josiah’s wrinkled cheeks and pooled in the sunken places where his teeth were gone. “Hey,” he moaned, pleading for us to understand. “Hey. Hey.”

We could still hear him grieving when we reached the front door.

If you have been keeping track of the time—which I hadn’t—you will realize we were in serious trouble. When Joe Riddley and I aren’t going to be home for dinner at noon, we let Clarinda know. If we’re running late, we call ahead to say so. By now, we were already three minutes from late, we’d be lucky to get home by one, and I’d let my cell phone battery run down.

I wanted to pull off the road and call her, but Joe Riddley refused to stop. “We’ll only be a little late,” he assured me.
He
didn’t have to worry. Clarinda thinks
he
walks on water.

As he proceeded at his usual decorous pace while everybody passed us, I remembered that Edie ought to be alive on this gloomy, cold day, and I felt I owed it to her to enjoy it. Eventually, however, questions began to float between me and the view.
Who killed her? Why? Was it a stranger, or someone she knew? Was it quick, or did she suffer? Was there one single thing I or Alex or anybody else could have done to prevent this?

By the time we pulled into our garage, my stomach was tied in knots. I doubted the forthcoming discussion with Clarinda was going to untangle them. As I reached for my door handle, I told Joe Riddley, “You need to know that I’ll probably spend Christmas in the hospital with bleeding ulcers from all this stress.”

“Ulcers aren’t caused by stress. They’re caused by bacteria or something.” Dr. Yarbrough pushed the button to lower the garage door and headed to the house. That man has no nerves.

Then I remembered the months after he’d been shot,
⁵
when his nerves were raw, and I winged a prayer of thanks for the way he naturally is: slow, calm, and only occasionally ornery.

We found Clarinda snoring in Joe Riddley’s recliner with my mother’s afghan over her lap and Lulu dozing on the rug at her feet. When Lulu gave a welcome yip, Clarinda levered the chair to sit up and gave a grunt of utter disgust. “Hunh. I thought that was the sheriff coming to tell me you’d died on the highway.”

“Were you and Joe Riddley raised by the same mother?” I inquired. “You both constantly expect disaster whenever somebody’s late.” Not to mention Lulu, who was hopping around like I’d returned from the grave—but that’s the nature of beagles.

“Being around you does that to people.” Clarinda climbed out of the recliner and stomped to the kitchen, surrounded by waves of aggravation. “You can have your dinner, but what isn’t burnt is already cold.” She jerked two plates from the cupboard and served them with scalloped potatoes, slices of baked ham topped with pineapple slices, and green beans. It looked fine to me, but she carried the plates to the dining room and set them down with thumps that shook the table.

“Mind the crockery,” Joe Riddley said mildly. He hung his cap by the kitchen door and went to wash his hands.

I looked around for any sign of salad. Having worked for me long enough to read my mind far too often, Clarinda gave a short nod toward the refrigerator. “Got congealed salad. Good thing, too. Lettuce and tomatoes would have rotted, waitin’ for you to get here.”

“We had a good reason.” I slid the salad from the refrigerator and saw it was one of my favorites, full of grated carrotsand crushed pineapple. Joe Riddley’s not real fond of stuff in his gelatin, so Clarinda only makes it occasionally, for me. The salad hadn’t been cut, either, which meant she hadn’t eaten. No wonder she was cranky. She and I both have a hard time being nice when we’re hungry. She was pouring two glasses of tea like she wished it was poison.

Feeling bad that we’d been late when she’d gone to extra trouble for me, I said, “I didn’t mean to tell you until after dinner, but we had to go tell Josiah Whelan that Edie died.”

She whipped her head around. “What happened to her? A car wreck?”

“You’ve got car wrecks on the brain. Watch out! You’re pouring tea all over the counter.”

About that time it reached the edge and her stomach, soaking her to the skin. She jumped and clutched her middle, then grabbed a sponge and started mopping the countertop. I cut three squares of salad and set each on a bed of lettuce with a dab of mayonnaise and a maraschino cherry on top. Mama used to fix them like that, but I generally spooned the salad into small bowls. Why was I going to so much trouble? To postpone telling Clarinda about Edie.

Clarinda finished the countertop and wrung out the sponge like she’d rather be wringing somebody’s neck. She didn’t say a word while she got out the mop and dried the floor, but then she propped her backside against the lower cabinets, folded her arms over her sizeable chest, and glowered. “It’s something bad, ain’t it? Something you oughta called and tole me.”

I turned too fast, annoyed with her and the rest of the world. My elbow caught the cherries and sent them flying. When the jar hit the floor, it shattered. I would never have believed one little jar could hold so much juice. It splashed all over everything in sight, including me.

Clarinda howled. “All over my kitchen. An’ I give it a good cleaning just this morning.”

I grabbed Lulu and carried her out to the backyard, which we’d recently fenced. She complained about staying in the cold, but she’d gotten shot the same night Joe Riddley did, and a three-legged beagle has enough problems without glass in her paws.

Clarinda was still glaring at the floor and the juice-speckled lower cabinets. I grabbed a paper towel and dabbed my shoes, stockings, and the hem of my best beige pants—which now had pink polka dots and, possibly, chocolate cake on the seat. Then I took her arm and steered her toward the living room. “Let’s leave this mess a minute. It’s not going anywhere, and neither of us is gonna be good for anything until we talk.”