Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery (11 page)

“Then she finds one of her blouses in the laundry hamper when she knows she ironed it the day before. It’s got a stain on the front, too.”

Edie lifted one hand, but Genna was only to finger four. “She finds her dishwasher full of clean dishes she didn’t put there, and”—her right pointer hovered over her left thumb—“there was something about magazines. What was it?”

Edie shrugged. “I thought I’d left a bag of magazines on the backseat of my car to take to the nursing home, but I’d left it on the back porch. This is ridiculous. I’m forgetting a few things, that’s all. I’m not forgetting to pay my bills, or go to work, or how to play cards,” she finished on a triumphant note.

“But you’re wearing yourself out taking care of that big place, trying to oversee the harvest, going to see Granddaddy Jo, playing cards all the time, and working. You can’t do it all, Edie. You can’t!” Genna’s face was flushed and damp, and red curls stuck to her forehead. “If you’d listen to other people for once, you’d put that grove on the market and get—”

“A nice little town house?” Edie’s face was so pink she looked more likely to die of a stroke than Alzheimer’s.

For once, I was glad to see Olive heading our way. She must have known what Genna had come out to say, because she demanded before she reached us, “Did you mention the keys? Or the pornography?”

Genna turned my way. “Talk some sense into her, Mac. She could be living in a lovely, safe, convenient town house if she weren’t so stubborn.” She stomped back to the house.

Olive watched her go. “I just came out to tell you Martha said dessert is ready.” She also hurried back to the house.

“Don’t say a word,” Edie warned, “if you plan to ‘talk sense into me.’ ” Her tone mimicked Genna’s exactly.

“I wouldn’t have the nerve. But have all those other things happened since we last talked?”

She nodded. Now I understood why she looked so ravaged.

“What was that about keys?”

Her hand trembled as she reached out to strip dead leaves from a hydrangea bush near the walk. “I found a set of keys in my purse that don’t belong to me. I cannot for the life of me figure out how they got there. I don’t leave my purse lying around.”

I mulled that over as we climbed the front porch steps. “Is there any identification on the ring? A car dealer’s name or something like that?”

“Nothing but a brass tag with one word engraved on it. I looked it up on the Internet . . .”

“And?” I prodded when it began to look like that word would hang in the air for eternity and we would never get dessert.

She gave me an embarrassed grimace. “It led to a softporn Web site. Adney thought that was hilarious. But now my e-mail is full of pornographic messages. Filthy, stupid stuff.”

“Not to mention boring and repetitive,” I added. “I was similarly afflicted after one of our teenage helpers got access to my office computer. You can clean it up, but it will take time.”

“Adney’s coming over Sunday afternoon to work on it.”

Olive spoke fiercely through the screened door. “We have a bridge game at your place Sunday afternoon, in case you’ve forgotten that, too. And it’s a waste of time for Adney to clean up the thing. Valerie and Frank will just use it again to look up more porn sites.”

“You don’t know that!” Edie’s voice was low and trembling.

Olive gave a little snort. “You know as well as I do you wouldn’t get that much filth from visiting the home page of one Web site. So where else could it come from? Unless Henry’s getting in and using the computer when the house is empty.”

Edie went rigid, and her voice was like ice. The last time I’d heard her speak like that was when the chair of the county commission suggested we do away with the bookmobile to rural areas. “Stay out of my business, do you hear me? All of you. I’m sick and tired of it. I can take care of myself.”

On my way to work Friday, I drove two miles out of my way to see if lightning had made an isolated strike and burned down the superstore before its grand opening at nine. The big gray box still squatted in its new parking lot, festive flags flying and balloons tugging at their tethers.

Trying to make myself feel better, I went on the Internet and ordered a new Mama Bear. A confirmation e-mail informed me it would arrive Tuesday or Wednesday.

Joe Riddley came in around eleven, hung his cap on its hook by the window, and reported, “I ran by and had a look at the new place. Their poinsettias are two dollars cheaper than ours, they are running a loss leader on pine straw for a dollar a bale, and they had a line at the garden center checkout register. But you know who’s running the garden department? Buck Johnson.”

Buck used to work for us, but we’d had to let him go because he was so ignorant about the nursery business, he couldn’t remember which were annuals and which were perennials. Seeing my face lighten up a bit, Joe Riddley added, “I chatted with the store manager a little, and he said they were delighted to get Buck, but he knew we’d been sorry to lose our manager.”

I knew why he was making me laugh. He hoped to distract my attention away from that bulging plastic bag he carried. I eyed it and got a sheepish look in reply. “I bought some socks as long as I was there, and they had shirts and work pants at a real good price—”

“Traitor,” I muttered.

He dropped the bag beside his desk. “You’d come back with a bag, too, Little Bit. There’s something mighty enticing about so much merchandise under one roof. It reminds you of all sorts of things you’ve been meaning to get.”

“I‘ve been meaning to get busy on this payroll,” I snapped. “So if you will pardon me—” Then I immediately felt bad, because it wasn’t his fault. I knew he was hurting as bad as I was. He was just a nicer person.

He dropped a hand to my shoulder. “Don’t get your dander up, honey. We’re going to be all right. This is nothing but one more change. By the time folks get as old as we are, we’re bound to know that adapting to change is part of life. It keeps things interesting.” He gave me a little squeeze and reached for his cap. “I’m going down to the tree lot for a while. You ought to see the dried-out things they have in their parking lot. Must have been sitting in a closed truck for weeks. I didn’t see a single one being sold, and our lot has been hopping all morning.”

Back when the boys were little, Joe Riddley had the bright idea to plant Christmas trees behind our nursery. Folks came from all around to choose and cut their own live trees, and we always threw in extra greenery. He strode out the door whistling.

He never knew I was watching out the window when he got in his car. I saw his shoulders slump. It’s hard to lose a business. It’s harder when three generations before you have succeeded so well. But he had a point about adapting.

Old Joe Yarbrough, Joe Riddley’s great-granddaddy, was running a small sawmill when General Sherman lit through Hope County in late 1864. Riding the wave of a sudden demand for reconstruction lumber, Old Joe built his sawmill into Yarbrough’s Lumber Company. Almost any tour of late-Victorian homes in Middle Georgia includes houses built with Yarbrough lumber. That’s what enabled Old Joe to buy a thousand acres of farmland and build the big blue house Ridd now owns.

A few decades later, Old Joe’s oldest son noticed agriculture was making a comeback, so he branched out into Yarbrough’s Feed and Seed, selling fertilizer, pesticides, bulk seed, animal feed, and orchard trees. The family survived the Depression by selling off the lumberyard and planting a number of their acres in vegetables, which they ate, sold at reasonable prices, and gave away. That built a lot of goodwill.

After World War II, Joe Riddley’s daddy, J.R., was smart enough to see that soldiers coming home would want to fix up their houses and yards to affirm that life was starting over, so he added a line of lawn mowers and small power tools, and turned some of his acreage into a nursery to carry ornamental trees and shrubs, perennials, bedding plants, and supplies for lawns and home gardens. He was also the first in Hope County to believe that pecans could be grown as a cash crop, and he convinced Josiah Whelan back in the fifties to plant his grove.

About the time Joe Riddley got out of college and went to work with his folks, subdivisions started springing up all over the region, so he and his parents decided to sell the hardware and equipment side of the business and develop the sizeable nursery we now had outside the city limits, to supply developers and large landscaping firms.

In one form or another, Yarbroughs had prospered and supplied the needs of several counties for nearly a hundred and fifty years. But none of the former generations had had to face a mammoth company with financial resources to undercut prices until we had to quit. I wished we had sold out years ago. I could be basking on a Tahiti beach instead of figuring another payroll and wondering how long we’d be able to meet it.

Lest our employees were wondering the same thing, Joe Riddley gathered them together Friday afternoon and told them, “Don’t worry, we aren’t letting anybody go unless we absolutely have to. We’re going to keep on providing excellent service and decent prices. I think folks will come back.”

I wondered if he knew they all headed to the superstore when they got off work.

 

That same weekend several other things happened that I only heard about later.

Adney went down to Edie’s late Friday afternoon to clean out her computer, since he couldn’t do it Sunday, and found Frank loading Edie’s stereo into Valerie’s car. Frank claimed Edie had sold it to him, but Adney called the sheriff’s department, who sent a deputy to check it out.

From an upstairs window, Valerie saw Frank spreadeagled against his cruiser and called 911. “Come quick! Somebody’s hurting my boyfriend!” Then she called Edie.

About the time the first deputy was explaining to the second deputy what was going on, Edie screeched to a stop in her driveway. She blistered Adney and apologized to both deputies, informing them that she
had
sold Frank the stereo, since she never used it. Adney got so hot under the collar with Edie that he went home without looking at her computer.

We heard about that when the sheriff came over Friday night to share leftover turkey Martha had sent home with us. He told the story of Frank’s near arrest and concluded, “The deputies thought she was making it all up to protect Sparks, but they couldn’t charge him with theft when the person being stolen from claims she sold it to him.” He finished chewing his turkey sandwich, then asked aloud what I was thinking. “If Edie didn’t sell him the stereo, and lets him get away with this, who knows what he’ll be ‘buying’ next?”

 

Sunday, we invited Walker and Cindy to go with us to a fish camp down by the river for an early supper. The country club was closed for the weekend, so we’d missed the Friday seafood buffet, and there’s a limit to how many times in a row Joe Riddley is willing to eat turkey. It seemed funny to have only four of us, but Martha, Ridd, and their kids had gone down to see her family for the day, and Cindy’s parents had invited their kids up to Thomson for the weekend and would return them later that night.

As we followed the waitress toward our table, I watched Cindy’s chic rear in a long rayon skirt and wondered if I ought to get me a long skirt or two. Joe Riddley bent to mutter, “No, Little Bit. You wouldn’t look like that. You’d look like a mushroom.”

“When your husband starts reading your thoughts, you’ve been married too long,” I muttered.

“Stop bickering, you two,” Walker said, pulling out a chair for me, “or we’ll ask them to seat you at a children’s table.”

Everybody ordered fried catfish. Cindy and I agreed to meet for coffee Thursday morning to double-check our Christmas lists, and then, to make conversation while we waited for our order to come, I asked Cindy if she’d heard from Genna about what happened Friday. “I sure did,” she said. “Wasn’t that awful? Genna knows good and well Edie never sold Frank that stereo. Why would she?”

“Maybe she needed the money,” I suggested, to see what Cindy would say.

She laughed. “Yeah, right. But did you hear what happened yesterday? It was worse!”

She scarcely waited for me to shake my head. “Adney went down again while Edie was at work, to see what he could do with her computer, and found Henry Joyner, bold as brass, sitting at her kitchen table eating his lunch.”

“How’d he get in?” Joe Riddley asked for the rest of us.

“Adney asked him. Henry said his daddy and Josiah always ate lunch there together, and he’d just kept it up—that he used his daddy’s key. Can you imagine?” Cindy never gave her maid a key. Whenever they went out of town, I had to go over and let the maid in.

“Clarinda has our key,” I pointed out, reaching over to smack Joe Riddley’s hand. He was working his way through the basket of hush puppies intended for the four of us.

Joe Riddley moved the basket of hush puppies so I couldn’t reach it, took the last two, set it beside Cindy, and added, “And Mary, Pete’s mother, cooked for Josiah’s mother, so Pete and Henry were both raised in that house.”

“Henry should have turned in the key.” Cindy reached for a hush puppy, looked puzzled, and handed the basket to Walker. “Can you get more of these?” She continued as if she hadn’t interrupted herself. “Genna never imagined he had one. She said Adney asked Henry to give it back, but Henry said he works for Edie and she’ll have to ask him herself if she wants it. When Adney warned him he was going to tell Edie he had it, he said the look Henry gave him would have peeled paint.” She looked up and exclaimed, “Why, there’s Olive!”

Olive came in wearing her usual cheerful combination of black and gray, but today she also wore an unusually big smile. “Congratulate me,” she commanded as she stopped by our table. “I just came from Edie’s bridge party, and I won!” She pointed the fingers of one hand toward her chest and did an affected little dance. “That means I’m in the lead for the January tournament.”