Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery (10 page)

At the grown-ups’ table, the men had two thoughts: shovel down all the food they could, then stagger to the den to watch football. From their analysis of various players’ strengths and weaknesses, you’d have thought the coaches would be calling them later for tips on how to win.

Olive complained across the table to me about problems she was having fixing up her place. “I bought a new couch, but I know it isn’t the one I sat on in the store. That one was firm, and this one is so soft you sink down in it. My back won’t be able to stand that. But they insist it’s the same one, and they won’t come take it back.” Considering that the furniture store she’d used was up in North Augusta, a good hour and a quarter away, I could understand their reluctance to make the trip. I made what I hoped were appropriate responses, bucking the ebb and flow of the men’s football talk.

Genna and Cindy did try to draw the men into other conversations, but I could have told them they were doomed. Even Adney didn’t have much luck trying to pump Walker for insurance rate estimates for some chain of sports complexes a friend of his wanted to build in small towns across Georgia. Walker never gives rates until he does research, but Adney kept insisting, “Just ballpark. Give me a ballpark figure. He wants to put in a rock-climbing wall, in-line skating, and a place for skateboarding. I told him I’d ask you what you thought you could insure him for. This could be big, Walker. You could make big bucks.” Sounded to me more likely Walker could pay out a lot of claims, but that was his business.

Down at the other end of the table, Martha tried to draw Edie out, but Edie scarcely said a word. She looked so wretched and ate so little, I wondered if she was missing Wick or if Josiah had taken a turn for the worse.

After dinner the kids ringed themselves around our table, and Ridd said, “It’s a Thanksgiving tradition in our family to name things we are thankful for. Bethany, you want to start?”

“Family, friends, and health,” she said promptly.

“No fair. That’s three,” Cricket objected from near his mother’s chair.

Martha reached out and pulled him close. “What are you thankful for, honey?”

“You,” he said in a gruff whisper, rubbing his head against her shoulder.

The other children named standard things like pets and friends, but Smitty surprised me. “Second chances.” His gaze slid to Ridd, then away.

“I’m thankful we’re all here and safe,” Cindy contributed.

Walker squeezed her hand. “I’m thankful for the best wife in the world. With apologies to the rest of you wives, of course.”

Olive waved for Ridd to go next. He lifted his glass toward me. “I’m thankful for my parents—who are both still with us in spite of Mama’s best efforts this year.”

Some
people thought that funny.

Joe Riddley put in freedom to worship as we choose, and I added thanks for a country where we’re still free to speak our minds most of the time. Then things came to a halt.

“How about you, Adney?” Walker prodded.

Adney lifted his hands with a grin. “You all have covered the bases, seems to me. Genna? How about you?”

She tried to smile, failed, then burst out, “I’m sorry. I just miss Daddy so much.” She pressed her napkin to her nose, jumped up, and left the room. Adney went after her.

“Olive?” Ridd asked.

She sighed. “I’ll pass this year. Like I’ve been telling Mac, the furniture store sent me the wrong couch and I’ve been on the phone all week trying to get the decorator who is supposed to paint my apartment, so I know when he’s coming and what color paint to buy. And now Edie told me on the way down here that our vacation schedules were posted yesterday, and I only get two days off at Christmas.” She raised her hands in surrender. “Too many things are going wrong right now for me to try and think of things to be thankful for.”

That certainly let the yeast out of everybody’s rolls.

“Why don’t we go let our dinner settle, then come back for dessert?” Martha suggested.

We all helped carry food and dishes to the kitchen. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw Smitty carrying in a stack of Martha’s china with a glass balanced on top. Tyrone brought up the rear with six more glasses, but they both looked more expert at carrying dishes than I would have expected. They must have been eating at Martha’s a lot lately.

“Hey,” I greeted them. “What you all been up to?”

I expected “Nuthin’ much,” but Tyrone’s big face lit up. “We’re taking sword fighting. What’s it called again, Smitty?”

“Kenjutsu.” To hear that word roll off Smitty’s tongue, you’d have thought he’d been speaking Japanese all his life.

“We’re having our first demonstration next Saturday afternoon. Not this one, but the next one,” Tyrone added, in case I didn’t remember the difference between “this Saturday” and “next Saturday.” “Could you come? We’re gettin’ pretty good.”

The thought of somebody turning Tyrone and Smitty loose with swords froze my gizzard, but I nodded. If somebody got killed, I could be a reliable witness. If I weren’t the corpse.

“Now, you and Edie get out of here,” Martha told me. “We’ve got plenty of help.”

I could tell Edie was of two minds about whether to stay or go, but I’ve never needed more than one invitation to leave a kitchen. I suggested we take a walk.

We ambled along without talking, enjoying the warm autumn sunshine and content to leave the conversation to a forest full of birds settling in for winter. Behind us we could hear my three youngest grandchildren calling and laughing as they flung a Frisbee.

“Kids are so sweet,” Edie said wistfully. “Do you ever wish they’d never grow up?”

“Heavens, no.” But something in her tone made me ask, “Is it Valerie giving you trouble, or Genna?”

She rubbed her mouth with one hand, as if wiping away something sour. “Both. Genna said you gave Ridd and Martha your house.”

I swatted away a late fly. “Sort of. We swapped with them, then used the money from the sale of their house to help buy the one we’re living in. It’s been a tradition since the house was built to give it and the five acres around it to the oldest child. Walker will get an equivalent amount from our estate—if I haven’t spent it all first.”

“But what about your old age? How do you know there’ll be enough? I mean, people live so long now, and health costs are going up so fast.” She bent to pick up a stick and started swishing weeds by the roadside. I’d never seen her so pent up. She looked like she’d rather be hitting some
body
instead of goldenrod.

She didn’t want to know what plans Joe Riddley and I had for our old age. She was worried about her own, about the very real questions that plague all of us who are aging.
What if I get incapacitated and need expensive care? What if I live longer than the money holds out? Will my children take care of me? Will they be financially able to, even if they want to?

Those shadows hover around a lot of other conversations. We eye one another wondering,
How could he afford early retirement? Are they crazy, spending all that on a cruise, or do they have better investments than we do?

I considered carefully what I ought to say. “I heard Genna suggesting that you sell your daddy’s house—”

Edie blew her lips out in a puff of disgust. “Genna keeps forgetting that the house and grove still belong to Daddy until—” She paused, then burst out, “Oh, Mac, I don’t want to lose him! But to see him lying there day after day is almost more than I can bear.” She turned away to stare across our neighbor’s watermelon field. I moseyed on slowly to give her time to collect herself and catch up.

When she came up alongside me, she asked abruptly, “Do you forget things a lot?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” That fell flat, so I admitted, “Of course I forget things, sometimes. I figure my hard drive is getting full, and wish somebody would invent a program to erase temporary files from the human brain, like they have for computers, to release some capacity. But it doesn’t bother me much. Are you still worrying about that?”

“Some.” She took the top off a goldenrod with one neat slice.

“Is it affecting your card playing?” I’d always wondered how she kept track of who had already played what, anyway.

She shook her head and said in a pleased voice, as if surprised by the discovery, “No! No, it’s not. I play as well as ever. It’s just at home that I keep coming across silly little things I don’t remember doing.” She gave a snort intended for a laugh. “Maybe I can start a bridge club in the Alzheimer’s center.”

“If that was a joke, buy a book and practice,” I told her. “But stop thinking like that. You’re only fifty. That’s young these days. You’re just under an enormous amount of strain.”

“But what if I wind up like Grandmama? Doesn’t it terrify you to think about getting older and being unable to take care of yourself?” She kicked a pebble far down the road.

No, but I had Joe Riddley, Ridd, Walker, and their families, all of whom would be kind to elderly ancestors. Edie had Genna, Adney, and Olive, none of whom I’d trust with my old age. What people ought to be told at twenty is, “Don’t just invest your money, invest your life. Invest yourself in an extended family or a broad community of support that will take care of you when you get old.” I didn’t know what to say to Edie, impoverished as she was.

She may have been having some of the same thoughts, for she was quiet the rest of our stroll to the highway. Halfway back, I pointed to a stand of pines Joe Riddley had planted several years before. “That’s our old-age pension. They ought to be ready for cutting about the time we get old. My daddy used to say God made pines the same nice green as money.”

She stopped to take a rock from her shoe. “The grove takes care of all Daddy’s expenses. We never thought it would come to that, but it pays his bills.” Finally I heard her familiar chuckle. “The nuts take care of Daddy, and my salary takes care of this nut. Alex said she told you that Wick—well, he left me in a mess, is what he did. I used to get so mad I wanted to break things, but now I find I enjoy my job.”

I was struck by how relieved and at ease she seemed now that she had somebody to listen. People were never meant to carry their burdens alone.

We headed home, talking about upcoming changes at the library and some ideas she had if they could get funding.

I should have remembered, though, one of Joe Riddley’s wisest observations: People usually wait until the very end of a conversation to bring up what’s closest to their hearts. As we turned into the drive, Edie asked, out of the blue, “Do you think Valerie is getting too involved with Frank? You saw them together a couple of weeks ago.”

“They seemed close—” I began.

“Too close?” Edie kicked another piece of gravel up ahead. “Valerie is engaged to somebody in the Navy. Did she mention that?”

“No, but you told me.”

“He’s away on six-month deployment, and she talks about him less and less. Meanwhile, Frank practically lives at our place, and Olive and Genna—” She paused to take a deep breath. “They think Valerie is letting him spend the night.”

Now we’d gotten to where the peanut butter met the bread. Edie had always lived what she believed, and she didn’t tolerate single people sleeping together under her roof. She and Genna had had several run-ins about that while Genna was in college.

“I don’t believe it,” she added, a shade too fast to be convincing. “I told Valerie how I feel about that before she moved in, and I trust her. I like Frank, too, though some people find him a tad peculiar. But since she started hanging out with him, Valerie has changed.”

“Changed how?” I was picking my way through that conversation like a cat walking on a sticky floor.

“A lot of little things.” She trailed her stick along Ridd’s newly cut lawn. “She got her belly button pierced a couple of weeks ago. She says she’s fixing to get a butterfly tattooed on her ankle, and she’s talking about piercing her tongue.”

I winced. “Yuck! But Walker showed up from college one weekend with his hair in a Mohawk. I guess every generation has to shock its elders before it
becomes
the elders.”

Edie wasn’t interested in pop psychology. “But her
tongue?
The possibilities for infection are enormous!”

“I know. But you know what bothers me most? That we grown-ups have permitted the world to get so outrageous that kids have to go to dangerous lengths to be shocking. Seems to me we should have stepped in and called a halt somewhere back there, but I’ve never figured out where or when we failed.”

“I refuse to take the blame for pierced tongues. Besides, how can Valerie sing with something in her mouth that makes her lisp?”

“I don’t have a clue. The only comfort I can offer is that in fifteen years all these tattooed, pierced kids with pink and blue hair will probably look—well, like Genna, or my kids.”

“I never looked like that in my life!”

We jumped. Neither of us had noticed Genna coming toward us. It’s hard to walk on gravel without making a sound, so she must have walked on the grass. Was she deliberately trying to hear our conversation? I gave her the benefit of the doubt and decided she’d been protecting her expensive shoes.

She frowned at Edie, then turned to me. “Did she tell you Valerie is letting Frank stay overnight?”

“You don’t know that!” Edie clenched her stick so hard it cracked.

Genna stood her ground, one hand on her hip. “Adney and I both know somebody is deliberately terrorizing you. Who else could it be?”

“Terrorizing?” I repeated blankly.

Edie slung the pieces of her stick across the yard. “I am not terrorized, I am confused.”

Genna spoke to me, ticking off items on her fingers. “First her car seat is back when she doesn’t remember leaving it that way. Then her door is unlocked and the cat is in when he’s supposed to stay out.”

I nodded. “I heard about all that.”