Death By Chocolate 6 (Mystery and Women Sleuths) (Josiah Reynolds Mysteries) (5 page)

I was trying to hold my cane and balance a casserole dish while reaching for the doorbell. Not an easy feat. I waited and waited and waited until I took my cane and hit the front door with annoying repetition. I hope Selena wasn’t taking a nap.

“Mrs. Reynolds?”

I snapped my head toward the driveway. There stood Selena, looking flummoxed and pulling off a pair of gardening gloves. I flashed a smile and held out my best microwaveable Pyrex dish. “Hello, Selena. I’ve brought you a casserole.”

She didn’t move forward to take it, but eyed me suspiciously as though I were a Greek bearing gifts. So I had to resort to my trump card. “Dear, my leg hurts. Do you think I could sit down somewhere?”

*

I was sitting in Selena’s kitchen sipping a cup of tea while watching her put the casserole in the freezer. She then joined me at the kitchen table.

“What’s all this?” I asked, looking at a mound of snapshots stacked on the table.

Selena smiled. “These are our vacation pictures. I was trying to organize them so I could put them in a proper album. ‘Trying’ is the operative word. It’s taking me a long time. When I pick up a picture, it reminds me of all the good times Dwight and I used to have, and then I just get lost in time. I look up and an hour has gone by with me just remembering.” She pulled the pictures into a stack. “I’ll get it done sooner or later. It’s hard to go through them. You know what I mean?”

“I certainly do,” I replied. “I know what it means to lose a husband.”

“That’s right. You’re a widow too. I had forgotten.”

“What makes you think you’re one? Dwight’s body has never been found. He could be alive.”

Selena’s eyes teared up. She pressed her hand to her heart. “I would feel it here if he was alive. He never would have left the baby or me. No one will ever convince me that he left us except by death. No one!”

I looked around for a tissue box. Seeing none, I handed her my lace handkerchief.

Selena gratefully accepted it, dabbing at her eyes.

“You know that Ginny feels differently. She clings to a sliver of hope that Dwight might still be alive. Maybe that’s not a bad idea . . . to have hope like that, I mean.”

Selena expelled a long, exasperated sign. “Mrs. Reynolds. I think Ginny needs professional help.”

“She says that you get upset when she puts up posters about Dwight. Even if he is dead, what harm can those posters pose?”

“Because I see them everywhere I go and so does my daughter, who cries when she sees her daddy’s face. It’s upsetting to us both to be constantly reminded of our loss. But no matter how I explain the situation to her, she will not stop begging for him. It’s very cruel what Ginny does.”

“I guess Ginny feels that unless she has a body to grieve over that Dwight is not really dead. Surely you can understand that?”

“I do, but she refuses to see my point of view. I’ve got a little girl who’s mourning the loss of her daddy to worry about. That’s my main priority now.”

There was nothing about what Selena was saying with which I could disagree. There were pictures of Dwight and Selena’s wedding on the living room walls, and his clothes still hung in their bedroom closet. I know because I peeked when I said I was using the bathroom. Maybe Ginny was wrong about Selena. It seemed to me that Selena was just trying to cope with a terrible situation the best way she knew how.

Selena was moving away from the pain.

I knew about this type of pain and sympathized.

It was still hard for me, and Brannon had been gone for years now.

The pain of loss never leaves. You just learn how to live with it, that’s all.

“I can’t believe that she snookered you, Josiah. You’re usually more perceptive.”

“I’m telling you what I saw. There were pictures of Dwight on the wall, his clothes were still in the closet and Selena seem genuinely traumatized. I think she believes she is doing what is in the best interest of her child.”

“Pshaw,” snorted Ginny.

I laid my hand on Ginny’s arm. “Ginny, you might have to accept that Dwight is dead. Or at least, stop looking for him. It’s tearing the rest of your family apart at a time when you and Selena should be a comfort to each other.”

Ginny glared steadily at me with her good eye. “Piss off, Josiah!”

“She actually told you to piss off?” laughed Lady Elsmere, clasping her hands in glee.

“Can you believe that? After all that trouble I went to.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” murmured Charles.

“Thank you, Charles,” I said, reaching for a Bourbon neat being offered on a silver tray. “How was Thanksgiving?”

“Just fine. We have a wonderful time with all the family together. I’d take it that Lady Elsmere was not too much of a burden,” chatted Charles.

“I’m sitting right here, Charles,” rebuked Lady Elsmere. “I’m old, but I can hear fine.”

“I know,” Charles replied before leaving the room with a smile on his face. He loved to tease June.

“He thinks just because he’s my heir that he can torment me.”

“You mean by not kowtowing to your every whim? If you don’t want Charles, I’ll take him. I simply adore him.”

June waved her hand in dismissal at me. “You couldn’t afford him for a week, let alone full time. Let’s get back to Ginny Wheelwright. Now that’s juicy. What did you say when she told you to piss off?”

“Nothing. I’m not going to get into a catfight with a grieving mother. I picked up my cane and left, hoping that she’ll come to her senses sooner or later.”

“So you think Dwight Wheelwright died in a fishing accident and is lying at the bottom of the Cumberland Falls?”

“I didn’t say that. I said that I thought Selena’s grief was real.”

“But you think that Dwight is dead?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know what to think. None of this makes any sense.”

“What about the chocolate horse? Doesn’t it seem strange that it had blood on it and that Selena threw it in the garbage on the day Dwight went missing?”

“That has bothered me as well as Dwight’s cap being found in the water six weeks after he went missing and that it looked new.”

“How do you know that it was Dwight’s cap?”

“His name was written on the underside with a permanent marker.”

“I think he ran off with another woman.”

“You always think things have to do with sex.”

“Well, don’t they?” replied June, looking snide.

“I’m just going to ignore that. If your bones weren’t so brittle, you’d still be bouncing on the sheets.”

“You really need to get a checkup, Josiah. A woman your age is not ready to ‘give it all up.’ You’re only fifty-one.”

I chuckled. “The last thing I need is a man.”

“You’re not bad looking since your friend Irene cleaned you up and Franklin took over buying your clothes.”

“If any man saw me naked, he’d go blind.”

“That nice-looking Choctaw from Oklahoma seemed to be interested.”

“And he ran home to his ex-wife the first chance he got.”

Lady Elsmere sighed. “At least you got some before he left town.”

“Can we stay on point?”

“If you aren’t going to give me any juicy details, then we need to hurry. I might fall asleep any moment from the sheer dullness of that thing you call your life.”

“Well, now I’ve forgotten why I came to talk to you,” I muttered.

It didn’t matter, for Lady Elsmere was nodding off in her chair.

Sighing with frustration, I tiptoed to the library door.

“Love you,” whispered the wizened old lady.

“Love you too, you old bat,” I returned, looking affectionately at June.

She was fast asleep.

It was an unusually warm day in December. Since the temperature was hovering around sixty degrees, I checked on the bees.

Lighting my smoker, I quietly lifted the outer cover of the hive, smoking the hole of the inner cover before putting the lid down. After waiting a minute, I took the outer cover off and poured more smoke down the hole of the inner cover again.

Since there was no one to help me, I had to put down my smoker and take off the inner cover with my hive tool.

It didn’t get any better than this. The bees were calm and regarded me with benign indifference.

With the hive tool, I scraped off some burr comb before pulling out a frame and inspecting it. The bees looked fat and happy clinging to the frame that held honey, pollen and baby bees. There was no sign of disease . . . or the Queen for that matter. But Queens are rarely seen, as they like to hide.

Lowering my face close to the bees, I took a deep breath, trying to sniff out any bad odors, which signal something foul. Nothing amiss.

Before closing the hive, I put patties of bee pollen on top of the nine frames as a little added precaution in case the bees ran out of food during the winter. I’d rather be safe than sorry when it comes to my bees’ health.

As a final inspection, I tried to move the hive with my knee. If it didn’t move, the bees had plenty of honey. If the hive shifted, then the bees needed to be fed sugar water, as they would starve without it. (I refuse to use corn syrup.) Most beekeepers lose hives in February due to starvation more than any other cause. That’s why I always put in extra pollen patties . . . just in case.

I had worked fifteen hives when I felt my cell phone vibrate. (Honeybees do not take kindly to noise.) Since I couldn’t use it while wearing my bee suit, I jumped in my little golf cart and moved some distance away from the bee yard, and removed my veil.

“Hello? Hello? Darn it.” I had missed the call. I then struggled to remember how to get a voice message. Finally I punched in the right code and listened to the message. Immediately, I returned the call.

“Selena?”

“Oh, Mrs. Reynolds! Thank goodness you returned my call. I didn’t know who else to talk to.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Ginny was over here making all sorts of threats. She’s totally off her rocker. I told her if she didn’t stop with this nonsense about Dwight, I wasn’t going to let her see the baby. I thought she was going to hit me. You should have seen Ginny’s face.

“Mrs. Reynolds, can you talk to her? If she doesn’t calm down, I’m going to have to issue a restraining order. I’m beginning to fear for my safety.”

“Did you call the police?” I inquired.

“No, but I will if she comes back. I really will.”

“Selena, lock your doors. Then sit down and have a nice cup of hot tea. That will do wonders to calm your nerves,” I advised.

“I can’t talk to Ginny today. I’m working my bees, but I will see what I can do. But I’m not promising anything, you understand.”

“I would be so grateful if you can do anything with her. I don’t want to hurt Ginny, but she has got to stop or I am going to lose my mind!” Selena pleaded.

“I understand. I know her pastor. Maybe he can talk to her.”

“That would be wonderful. Just any help at all would be great. I don’t want to cause trouble with Ginny. I’m very fond of her and wouldn’t like to see her get into trouble. Thanks so much, Mrs. Reynolds. I knew I could count on you.”

The phone went silent. So Selena could count on me, eh. Well, I would see about that.

“I didn’t threaten her. Not really threaten, I mean,” justified Ginny, standing defiantly in the middle of her living room.

“You must have done something to make her mad.”

“It’s none of your beeswax.”

“Very funny. Look, I’m trying to help you, Ginny, but I getting tired of you being a bitch. You asked me to help you and that’s what I’ve been trying to do, but you are being as difficult as difficult can be. I’m done with you if you don’t straighten up. I mean it,” I threatened.

Ginny looked at me with undisguised hatred before exploding into tears. She looked like a fountain with all that water and her glass eye flipping in her eye socket for effect.

I had the sudden urge to laugh, but knew it would be in poor taste. Biting my lip, I tried to stifle the mirth I felt sliding up my esophagus threatening to escape my mouth. She just looked so pitiful.

As if to add to this comic scene, the glass eye kept flipping so fast that it finally popped out and hit me in the face.

Suddenly Ginny was gasping for breath and grabbing at her chest.

Now – that wasn’t funny. I helped her into a chair.

“Ginny! Ginny! What’s wrong? Are you having a heart attack?”

“Don’t know. Jo, find my eye for me.”

I looked about and spied it under a chair. With my cane, I fished it out and handed it to her.

Sucking the eye clean, Ginny then put it back in her eye socket. Blinking, she got the eye side to flip up.

“I’m going to call 911,” I uttered, looking around for a phone.

Ginny grabbed my arm. “Don’t. I feel better now. I don’t think it was a heart attack. Just stress.”

“I think a doctor should see you.”

“I promise to go tomorrow. Just sit with me for a while, will ya, Jo?”

“I don’t know,” I replied wearily. “I really think you should see someone today.”

“Get me a glass of water, hon, and I’ll tell you why I’m so angry with Selena.”

I hurried into the kitchen and brought back a glass of water for her. Pulling up a chair, I sat next to Ginny and felt her pulse. It seemed to be normal, as did her color, and she wasn’t breathing hard any more.

After taking several sips, she handed the glass back to me. “I know I’m being a bother.” She grabbed my hand. “Jo, you gotta believe me. A mother knows. Something is very wrong and it starts in my son’s house. I know it has something to do with Selena. I bet my life on it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t agree, Ginny. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

Ginny pulled away and was lost in thought.

I was tired of all the drama, but I didn’t want to leave her in this state. I was racking my brains for someone to call to take over. I had done my part.

“Jo? Let’s say you’re right that Selena had nothing to do with Dwight’s disappearance.”

“I’m listening.”

“Would you look at the police file and tell me what you think?”

“You should really talk to the detectives working the case, or hire a private investigator.”

“Their minds don’t work like yours.”

“How’s that?”

“They follow rules. You ain’t got no rules.”