Mama Stalks the Past (2 page)

Nat glared. “You ain’t gonna get away with what you’ve done!”

Mama looked as if she couldn’t believe what
she was hearing, especially in the sanctuary of her own kitchen. “Boy, what
are
you talking about?”

“You’re nothing but a good-for-nothing
thief
!”

I feared Mama was going to burst. “Get out of my house!” she hollered.

Tears welled up in Nat’s marble eyes. His fist clenched. This time when he spoke, his voice trembled. “You’re gonna pay, Miss Candi, sure as you were born to die, you’re gonna
pay
for taking what my Mama had!” A curtain was being dragged from the window of Nat’s eyes, giving a glimpse into the depths of his bitter disappointment. Nat had been his mother’s only child; his father had been killed. Hannah Mixon had raised her son to be self-indulgent. Now, thirty and unmarried, he was irresponsible and known for stumbling in and out of fights, most of which he lost, and now he was losing his fight with Mama.

Mama’s voice tempered. “I never spoke a word to your mother!” she told Nat, more gently.

Veins throbbed at Nat’s temples. His nostrils flared. There was a crazed look on his face, one that made me decide I’d better do something fast. I took a gulp of air and cleared my throat. “Nat,” I said, pulling out a can of roach spray from the kitchen cabinet, “you’d better get out
of here!” I positioned the can toward his eyes. If he tried to hit Mama, I’d spray them … a trick I’d learned in a rape defense class in Atlanta.

Nat’s finger was shaking in Mama’s face again. If he feared the roach spray, nothing in his threat revealed it. “My Mama wasn’t smart enough to make a will without somebody like you showing her how to do it! You’re gonna be sorry for what you did!”

My finger rested on the spray button. If he came one step closer …

But Mama was unafraid, unshaken. “Get out of my house this minute, Nat Mixon!” she said.

“You talked Mama into giving you everything—”

Mama’s eyes blazed. “You’re accusing me of something that I don’t know
anything
about!”

“Give me back what’s mine!”

At that moment, Daddy walked into the room and I began breathing lighter. “What’s going on in here?” he asked, looking at Nat. “You’re talking so loud they can hear you clear across town!”

Veins were popping through Nat’s neck like ridges. “You ain’t right, Miss Candi!” he declared hotly.

“Soon as I can make some sense of what Hannah’s done, I’ll give back whatever you think belongs to you!” Mama shot back.

“You’ve got everybody in this town fooled, thinking you’re so much!”

Daddy, who had swiftly assessed the situation, now planted himself firmly between Nat and Mama. Mama glanced at Daddy but kept talking to Nat. “I don’t want
anything
that Hannah left!”

“I’m gonna kill you!” Nat yelled.

That was too much for my father. He moved closer to Nat and his hands balled into fists. “Don’t you threaten Candi!” he roared at Nat.

Mama looked puzzled now. I think she couldn’t believe what was happening. My hand tightened on the roach spray.

Nat took one step backward. His eyes sent a terrible message: I knew he could shoot Mama and watch her kick without feeling any remorse. “All I’ve got to say is that you’d better sleep with one eye open!” he snarled.

Daddy’s body tensed to take a swing at Nat. I swallowed the lump in my throat. We were seconds from Daddy and Nat throwing down in a fistfight and we all knew it. Fortunately, Nat seemed bewildered by this sudden turn of events. I suspected something in his past experience warned him against hooking up with my father. Anyway, he took a loud ragged breath, then turned to face the woman who’d come in with him. She seemed to understand and shook her
head. Without another word or threat, Nat turned and followed her into the foyer and out the front door.

After they’d gone, Mama sighed. “Nat’s been drinking since Hannah died,” she told Daddy and me.

I put the roach spray back into the cabinet, examined my hands to make sure that none of the poison had gotten on them. Not satisfied, I went to the sink to wash them. Wiping my hands dry, I glanced out the window. Afternoon shadows had begun to settle. I studied the house next door, a house that for the past five years had been occupied by the recently deceased Hannah Mixon and her son Nat. Lights burned in the living room; every other room was dark.

“He smelled like a distillery,” I said, wondering about Nat’s female companion. What part did she play in his outburst?

Daddy, who had followed Nat and the woman to the front door and set the security alarm, scowled. “If he keeps plucking my nerves, I’ll beat that boy’s behind until it’s sober!”

I turned from the window. “Mama, you’d better tell the sheriff about Nat’s threat. Just in case he tries something.”

“Candi doesn’t need Abe,” Daddy snapped. “Nat ain’t crazy enough to try to hurt her!”

I wasn’t so sure about that. Nat Mixon and I
weren’t friends, but I’d had several chats with him on previous visits home. He was impulsive, especially when he was drinking—I didn’t trust him or his judgment in the least. “What
will
was he talking about?” I asked.

Mama answered me. “I got a phone call from the lawyer Calvin Stokes this afternoon. Stokes told me that Hannah made a will and—”

“I didn’t know that Miss Hannah was smart enough to make a will,” I interrupted.

Mama shook her head at my comment. “Other than Nat,
I am the only person Hannah named in her will
!”

I threw my head back and laughed. “Nat thinks you talked his mother into leaving you everything she owned?”

Mama looked annoyed and her tone cut my laugh short. “The whole thing is stupid—I mean, I didn’t even
know
Hannah Mixon. Why would she put me in her will?”

“The way Nat’s carrying on, maybe she left you something valuable,” I said.

Mama wasn’t impressed. “Why would Hannah Mixon leave me
anything
at all?” she argued, then walked over to the oven and pulled out a pair of sweet potato pies.

Daddy walked out of the room, I suspected to the hall bathroom.

The aroma of Bavarian chocolate coffee
quickly mingled with the mouth-watering smell of the pies. After she put them on the counter to cool, Mama poured herself a cup of freshly brewed coffee. “Hannah lived like a hermit! I never once was invited into her home.”

I joined Mama at the coffeepot. “I can’t believe you, the Good Samaritan of Otis, never visited your next-door neighbor.”

“Once I tried to take her a bowl of my homemade soup. That woman looked out of her window right into my face and didn’t answer her door!”

I decided not to wait for the pies to cool. I love hot sweet potato pie. “You’re exaggerating!”

“I am not!”

I opened my hands in submission. Mama clearly wasn’t in the mood for playful disagreement. “Then the good Miss Hannah was touched in the head. Nobody sane refuses your soup, Mama.”

“I tried to be friendly,” Mama insisted. “I really did!”

“You might have misunderstood—”

“
SIMONE
,” Mama said hotly, “
HANNAH MIXON HATED ME!
”

Daddy walked back into the kitchen and I cut a generous piece of the pie for each of us. He set a cup of coffee down on the table and pulled out a chair. “Candi, I wouldn’t take that too personal
if I was you. Talk is that there weren’t many people Hannah liked. And fewer that liked her!”

Mama shook her head, troubled. “I hope Calvin Stokes can shed light on what Hannah had on her mind. I couldn’t stand the thought of people thinking I’d taken advantage of an old woman!”

I sat at the table next to Daddy, took a bite of my pie, and sipped from my coffee. The rich taste slid over my tongue. “Just get Calvin to give Nat whatever his mother left to you,” I told Mama.

Her head tilted. “That can’t be much. That old house, a few pieces of furniture!”

Daddy scowled like he was remembering his encounter with Nat. “Whatever it is Hannah left you, Candi, sign it right over to that fool Nat before I have to jack him up!”

Mama folded her arms across her breasts. “Calvin wants to see us first thing Monday morning, James. You can be sure that I’ll give Nat back whatever Hannah left me. And that will be the end of all this nonsense from him!”

Daddy’s scowl deepened.

“You look like you just sucked a lemon,” I told him.

He fiddled with the handle of his coffee mug.
“I was just wondering who that woman with Nat was.”

“I was going to ask you or Mama the same thing.”

“Candi?” Daddy asked, looking toward Mama.

Mama shook her head. “My guess is she’s some kin to Nat.”

Daddy shrugged. “Hannah was a strange bird. Talk is that Abe ordered an autopsy on her body.”

Mama’s eyebrow rose. Abe Stanley was the Otis County sheriff. “You think Abe suspects something suspicious about Hannah’s death?” she asked. Her tone reminded me of the relationship she had developed with the sheriff shortly after she and my father had settled in town.

The day was hot, she had said, the heat desert-like. Patches of gnats darted along the highway. Mama had just driven onto the Coos-whatchie River bridge, where trees hang on both sides and form a thick green cascade. She was noticing how the sunlight streamed through their branches, casting dancing shadows, when she heard a bang followed by the sound of flapping—her front tire had blown. She pulled her car to the shoulder just as Sheriff Abe and his deputy, Rick Martin, drove by. They stopped
and the sheriff made Rick change Mama’s tire. Grateful, Mama baked them a sweet potato pie that afternoon and delivered it to the sheriff’s office. They loved it. Mama baked another. Soon her pies and their delivery became a weekly ritual. During her visits, the sheriff happened to mention a couple of unsolved petty crimes. After a few suggestions from Mama, the good sheriff figured out who was behind them. Sheriff Abe learned to respect Mama’s opinion, which she has always called her sleuthing intuition. Now, whenever something comes up that the sheriff can’t figure out, he asks Mama’s opinion. She loves it.

If Daddy was remembering Mama’s little hobby of crime solving, he didn’t show it. Instead, he rolled his shoulders like they were stiff, maybe aching. “You can’t believe everything you hear at Joe’s barbershop,” he said, as if an afterthought. “Hannah probably died of a heart attack like Dr. Clark said she did.”

The phone rang. Mama crossed the room and answered it. Daddy put the last bite of pie in his mouth and stood to put on his jacket. Mama held up her hand, gesturing to him not to leave. After a moment, she hung the phone on its receiver, then wiped her forehead.

I pushed my empty coffee cup away.

Mama’s eyes were wide, clear, the blacks and
whites pure, separate. My heart skipped. I knew that look—Mama’s sleuthing intuition had been stirred. “That was Abe,” she told us, her voice low. “He just got the results of Hannah’s autopsy—she didn’t die of a heart attack. Somebody pumped her full of poison!”

I
moved my head and cracked an eye. Darkness blanketed the room. I sat up, yawned, and looked at the clock. Two
A.M
. I heard the noise, the same one that had just shaken me from my deep sleep. I was not in Atlanta. I was in Otis.

The aroma of hazelnut coffee tingled my nostrils. I slipped out of bed. Mama sat at her kitchen table, her hand cupped around a mug.

I touched her shoulder. “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

Mama looked up. “No.”

I yawned again, stretched, then made a bee-line to the cabinet where she kept her dishes and got a mug. “Any more pie?” I asked hopefully.

Mama pointed to a Tupperware cake plate on
the ceramic-tiled counter. Then she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes the way she always does when she’s trying to figure out something. Her brow was furrowed.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked her.

“Hannah Mixon!”

“You may be a rich woman,” I teased. “Hannah might have left you a fortune!”

Mama stroked the side of her cheek with her fingertips, then raised one eyebrow in a slant that was clearly a signal that she was not in a joking mood. “Why would that woman leave me anything?”

“You were neighbors,” I pointed out.

“I told you, I didn’t even know that woman!”

I didn’t say anything, I headed for the coffee and pie. When I’d gotten my treats and was sitting at the table next to Mama, I reached over and touched her arm. “Mama, Miss Hannah must have thought a lot of you to leave you in her will,” I said, trying to sound sanctimonious instead of funny.

“Hannah Mixon wasn’t that kind of a woman!”

“Okay, then she was crazy, but who cares, she remembered you in her will!”

Mama spoke as if she was thinking out loud. “I don’t like it,” she mused. “Something in the milk ain’t clean.”

“Two can play the cliché game,” I retorted cheerfully. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Hannah Mixon ain’t never given anybody except Nat anything,” Mama said sourly.

“She might have had a change of heart.”

“She was pure selfishness.”

“That’s a bit strong, don’t you think?”

“Simone, trust me, Hannah Mixon had something up her sleeve.” She dropped her glasses back on the bridge of her nose and fiddled with them until they were comfortable. “The thing that bothers me is that people might believe I influenced her—you know, talked her into giving me her things!”

Mama’s tone made me realize that I’d misjudged her feelings about Daddy’s decision to move back to Otis. I remembered the day eight years earlier when I had stumbled in on their conversation. My father had been stationed at Beal Air Force Base in California. He was saying, “Our boys Will and Rodney are doing okay, and Simone is almost finished high school. Thirty years is enough to give Uncle Sam’s Air Force, Candi. I’ve decided to retire.”

“Fine,” Mama had told him. “But we’ve got to think of Simone.”

“What about Simone?” Daddy asked.

“I was hoping we could settle where Simone plans to go to college.”

“No,” Daddy said. “I want to go
home
.”