Death in the Cards (11 page)

“She's fine—well, her hips bother her every now and again—but she's just busy, what with sorting things out for the historical society.” The Paradise Historical Society had
recently inherited a 1930s' era estate house that was once in the Breitenstrater family, of Breitenstrater Pie Company fame, one of Paradise's major employers. The house would be home to the historical society and its holdings. Mrs. Beavy was in charge of overseeing the new displays of items for the museum, which was supposed to have its grand opening at Christmas.

I grinned, knowing Mrs. Beavy was joyous in her busyness.

“Mrs. Rowentree came by the Breitenstrater house”— in the way of a small town, the building would be called that for decades, never mind that it was now owned by the Paradise Historical Society—“and told Mamaw all about the petition. She called me and told me to get in here and sign it for both of us. And to tell you she's not so busy that she doesn't still want you to drop by next Thursday afternoon for a visit.”

Since Mrs. Beavy had started doing most of her laundry at home, I'd started dropping by for a cup of coffee and a slice of her famous secret-recipe buttermilk pie every other Thursday evening, after closing up the laundromat.

I handed Chip the petition. “Tell her I'll be there.”

“Will do,” Chip said, signing his name carefully, then adding his grandmother's name on the next line.

Chip handed me back the petition and started for the door, then stopped. “Oh, Josie, I hope it's okay I put the suitcase right behind the order bin. It wouldn't fit.”

I frowned, confused. “Suitcase?”

“You didn't see it yet? A customer—I think she was one of the psychics—left it off yesterday. Didn't want to leave her name or any directions about what she wanted done. I'm assuming it's filled with dirty laundry. She said you'd know who it was from and what to do.”

My heart plunged. I swallowed hard. “Was she wearing a brightly colored warm-up suit?”

Chip nodded. “And hot-pink high-top sneakers.”

The suitcase—Ginny Proffitt's, I knew, even though Chip hadn't directly said that and the suitcase bore no name tag—was a lot like one my Aunt Clara had once had. Hard-sided, made of shiny rigid plastic in a tan tortoise-shell swirl. Metal latches. Empty, it weighed far more than the average person could easily carry. Last made long before the wheeled, soft-sided, pullout-handle variety, maybe back in the 1950s. On eBay, this would be a collectible.

I studied the suitcase back in my office/storeroom, somehow feeling the need for a little bit of privacy.

I remembered my Aunt Clara's from the one and only trip she took—to Florida, for her sister's funeral. She sat in the kitchen, crying at the table, while the cab—which Uncle Horace had hired to come all the way down to Paradise from Masonville, to take Aunt Clara to the airport over in Cincinnati—waited in front of our house on Maple Street. The neighbors watched from their front porches. A cab was an unusual sight in Paradise.

Aunt Clara cried because she didn't want to leave Guy, even knowing he was safe at Stillwater, for the four days the trip would take. While Uncle Horace told her it would be okay, he told me to carry her suitcase down to the cab. I was fourteen, but that suitcase was as heavy as if it were filled with the flat fossil-ridden stones from the bottom of Licking Creek. I tried to hoist it down the steps. The cabbie stomped out his cigarette right there in Aunt Clara's bed of mums and came and got the suitcase for me.

While the cabby's back was turned—even he grunted, loading the suitcase in the trunk—I fished the cigarette butt
out of the bed and put it in my pocket, knowing Aunt Clara would really pitch a fit if she saw a cigarette among her mums. We'd probably never have gotten her off to her Florida sister's funeral. Then I ran back in and fetched the little square makeup case that matched the suitcase. The makeup case was much lighter, holding as it did only Aunt Clara's comb and bobby pins, for securing her long braid up in a knot, and her Pond's Cold Cream—her only concession to vanity.

That night, I went out in the backyard and tore off the filter and tried to smoke the cigarette, but it set me to coughing so hard, Uncle Horace heard me and came out and found me. He asked me if I'd gotten the cigarette from my no-good cousin Sally Toadfern, who even then smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and I told him no. I've always been grateful that he believed me, just sent me off to bed early with no questions, and never mentioned it to Aunt Clara.

Aunt Clara's suitcase was smooth and unmarred. The only time I saw her use it was on that trip to Florida. But Ginny's version was beaten and dented and scratched from years of hard use. Aunt Clara'd had no chances for travel, as Ginny seemed to have. I smoothed my hand over the suitcase's surface. I thought it said something about Ginny that she carried such an old, out-of-style suitcase—but what? That she was cheap?

Or had the suitcase belonged to Ginny's mother or some other relative, so that Ginny'd kept the suitcase all these years out of sentimentality? She hadn't seemed at all the sentimental type. But then, I'd only met her in the parking lot, when she'd foisted that reading on me, and then seen her once with Dru, at Serpent Mound.

I was spending all this time thinking about the outside of the suitcase, I knew, because I was fearful of opening it and seeing what was inside.

I shook my head to clear it. In the parking lot, Ginny had said she hadn't had time to launder her clothes before coming out here and she'd bring them by the laundromat. That's all the suitcase would contain, I told myself.

I started to open the metal latches on the top of the suitcase, then stopped. The suitcase might just contain dirty laundry, but it was the dirty laundry of a woman Owen and I had found dead. It was possible that something could be in there that would shed some light on her death or prove that it wasn't suicide, as Chief Worthy apparently believed. I should turn it over to him.

But it couldn't hurt to take a look first, I reasoned. Then I'd turn it over to the police.

I unlatched the luggage and opened it up. For a second, I closed my eyes, wincing at the sickening smell that immediately filled my storeroom: mustiness. Filth. Body odor.

I opened my eyes and looked in the suitcase, which held only one item of clothing: extra-large bibbed overalls that had once been white, but were streaked with many different colors of paint and dirt. On top of the bibbed overalls was a plain white handkerchief that was also paint- and dirt-splattered.

Ginny had written on the handkerchief with a black felt-tip pen:

Josie
—

In case anything happens to me, know this:

That there is a devil, there is no doubt.

But is he trying to get in . . . or trying to get out?

Mrs. O will help if you start from the end

And go to the beginning to find out.

Peace,

Ginny.

For a long moment, all around me seemed to fall away and I knew only the nasty smell of the dirt-ridden overalls and the words of Ginny's note, ringing in my head.

Then, as if from a great distance, I heard the ringing of something else . . . a telephone . . . but I seemed to be in a trance, unable to react to it.

How did Ginny Proffitt know my aunt's old saying? It wasn't a common saying. And yet, she'd known it. . . just as she'd known about my dreams of Mrs. Oglevee. And she had used this saying in a message that, judging from the phrasing she used, she'd written right before her death . . .
in case anything happens to me.

I grabbed up the handkerchief. It seemed an odd thing to go with the overalls. The handkerchief was an ordinary men's handkerchief, plain other than the white-on-white striped border, no monogrammed initials or other detailing. But it seemed an oddly delicate, almost feminine, companion to the old painter's overalls, which were men's size.

The telephone ringing stopped. My initial reaction of freezing creepiness melted away and frustration took its place, like an itchy rash. Why had this woman turned to me for help? And how had she gotten into my head, knowing about my aunt's saying and my occasional dream visits with Mrs. Oglevee? Why couldn't she have just left me a normal message, say, a recording on my voice mail. Something like “Hey, Josie, it's Ginny Proffitt and I think so-and-so is going to kill me at the maze tonight?” Better yet, why couldn't she have just bypassed me completely and gone to the police with that concern?

Maybe she had, I thought. Maybe she'd felt unsatisfied with Chief Worthy's reaction to her fears, found him too dismissive.

The door from my laundromat swung open. Quickly, I stuffed the handkerchief in my pocket and slammed the suitcase shut. Both movements were instinctive reactions. Something told me that I didn't want just anyone knowing about Ginny Proffitt's luggage and its contents.

I hefted the suitcase off of the top of my desk and quickly stashed it under the desk as Chip Beavy walked in. Of course, my effort to hide the bag wasn't necessary where Chip was concerned. After all, he'd taken it from Ginny to begin with. But I hadn't known who was coming into my office.

I wanted to ask him more about what Ginny said when she dropped off the suitcase, but something about Chip's expression stopped me. He looked worried.

“I answered the phone for you out front.” He nodded at the phone on my desk. “You'd better pick up. It's Don Richmond.”

I inhaled sharply. Don was Stillwater's director. I visit Guy every Sunday at Stillwater, and if something was going on that couldn't wait just a day, then it couldn't be good news.

My heart clenched. Oh Lord. Guy was in good health, although I worried about the fainting spell he'd had, but there could have been an accident. . .

The old handkerchief with Ginny's recent cryptic note in my pocket and the strange old suitcase with its stranger-still contents stashed under my desk slipped completely from my mind, as if I'd never seen, smelled, or touched either one. I reached for the phone on my desk.

9

The week Aunt Clara had to go to Florida for her sister Jeanne's funeral, a killing frost came early to Paradise. Uncle Horace and I felt it coming in the cold snap in the air, sitting on the front porch of our little house on Maple Street. We were sitting on the porch swing, having glasses of iced tea I'd made.

Uncle Horace was dozing and I was thinking about how someday maybe I'd get away from Paradise. Does anyone at age fourteen want to live forever in the town they grew up in?

My mind was wandering with visions of me traveling to some of the places I'd read about in books Winnie—even then, I called her Winnie—had given me on the bookmobile. Far away exotic places. Like Greece. Or Nepal. Arizona, even.

And I knew I'd go to these places someday because a fortune-teller had told me so at the Mason County Fair. The woman, looking uncomfortable in her too-hot gypsy garb—I reckon she knew it was an expected cliché—had also told me that on my travels I'd meet someone handsome and smart
and funny, who'd appreciate my finer qualities. My insatiable curiosity, for example. My love of good books.

But a chill wind swept over the front porch, nudging the porch swing so that Uncle Horace jolted awake, and I was whisked away from my Greece-Nepal-Arizona-cute-boy dreams back to our porch, back to the sound of the last of the summer bugs every now and again giving a lonesome chirp, the fall silence between their chirps drawn out as if the cold had stolen their breath. Suddenly, the iced tea glass was too chilly in my palm.

“Heard on the radio today there's a chance of the first killing frost come early tonight,” Uncle Horace said. He kept a radio going in the laundromat for his customers. Years later, the TV at the front of the laundromat would be my innovation.

“Yeah,” I said. “Want me to make us coffee instead? Maybe slice us some more apple pie?”

Uncle Horace yawned. “No. I'm still full from that delicious dinner, Josie.” I'd made tuna casserole, and put extra crumbled potato chips on top, since Aunt Clara wasn't there and couldn't harp on me for being wasteful. “But I'm also worrying about your Aunt Clara's tomatoes.”

We swung back and forth in the chill wind, thinking about her tomatoes out back of the house, a dozen bushes laden with still-green tomatoes.

On the one hand, Aunt Clara wouldn't want anyone else to do the canning. I helped, of course, but she never let me do any of it on my own, because she was afraid I wouldn't do it just right and the jars wouldn't seal or the jellies wouldn't gel and we'd have a basement full of poisonous green beans and green tomato relish and runny jelly. But truth be told, I'd helped with every step of the canning for several years now, and knew I could do it myself.

I also knew Aunt Clara would be heartbroken if she came back from her sister's funeral and found we'd let a killing frost take the green tomatoes. To her, it would be a failure in frugality that might mean Guy wouldn't get the care he needed at some point in the future. No green tomato relish today could spell financial disaster in the future.

But Uncle Horace wasn't going to give me direction about what to do. He ate green tomato relish without complaint, but such matters were not in his department. I could just let the tomatoes go, and no one would criticize me.

And so I found myself sitting in the front porch swing, somehow faced with a decision that, at fourteen, I could only sense was much greater in its import than whether or not the green tomatoes out back were saved from a killing frost, only to be minced into relish. The burden of the tomatoes' fate weighed heavily on me.

Finally, I said, “Guess I'd better go pick the tomatoes. I'll fix and can the relish tomorrow after school.”

Uncle Horace hopped up quickly, and I realized he was relieved at my decision. “I'll help you pick them,” he said. “That's all I can do,” he added, his voice a little sorrowful.