Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery (25 page)

Joe Riddley swabbed up the last of his dressing with a piece of lettuce. “Folks can generally miss something right under their noses if they choose not to see it. Like you not seeing how dangerous it is for you to get mixed up in this stuff. One of these days your guardian angel is gonna throw up her hands and go home, and I’m gonna be looking for a replacement wife.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

He set down his fork after finishing the salad and gave me a solemn look. “The day after your funeral. I swear it, if you don’t straighten up and fly right. Now start eating. You know I don’t like driving these roads after dark.”

I bent toward my salad plate and started picking out bits that hadn’t been slathered with dressing. He motioned to the waitress. “Could we have another salad with bleu cheese dressing, please? I got her order mixed up.”

After she removed the plate, he covered my hand with his. “You know I love and appreciate you, honey. I even appreciate the fact that once you get your teeth into something worthwhile, you don’t let it go until it’s finished. Lulu takes after you that way. But I don’t want to lose you. Recent months have taught me to be glad for every day we’ve got together, and I want a lot of them.”

My throat was all choked up, but I managed to gulp out, “Me, too.”

“So I want to make you a deal. Don’t you go places without me. Let me know ahead of time, and I’ll come along. Can you agree to that?”

“I’d be proud to have you.”

Neither of us imagined then how hard that bargain was going to be to keep.

 

When we got home, I took off my clothes and put on a robe, planning to put my feet up a while before bed. I’d barely gotten settled good on the sofa, Lulu’s head in my lap, when the phone rang. “Can you get that?” I asked Joe Riddley. His recliner was beside the phone.

“It’s probably somebody wanting you down at the jail.” But he muted the television and growled, “Yes?” into the receiver. In an instant, he turned into Mr. Sweetness and Light. “Why, sure, she’s right here.” He held it in my direction.

As I padded barefoot across the room, I muttered, “If I have to go back out tonight, I may shoot somebody. I don’t remember you having to go out that much at night.”

“That’s because you always turned over and went back to sleep.”

I snatched the phone and said, in a voice a tad less than charming, “Judge Yarbrough.”

“Mac?” Meriwether’s voice was more amused than worried.

“Oh, honey, I was afraid you were a pesky deputy wanting me down at the jail. Has the baby come?”

“Stop asking me that.” Now she sounded more like a normal pregnant lady, crabby as all get-out. “The baby hasn’t come, I am sleeping terribly, and I feel big as an eighteen-wheeler. But what I wanted to tell you is that we solved the mystery of the ringing alarm. For two weeks, our security alarm has gone off at all hours. Nobody could figure out who was tripping it.”

“Well, tell me. Who’d be dumb enough to break in in the middle of a workday?”

She laughed. “Three baby kittens. Apparently they’ve been moving around at night, which triggered the motion sensors. They were living in a big wicker basket, and this afternoon Tyrone startled them when he was putting up merchandise. When he tried to grab them, the black one took off straight up the shelves and leaped for another shelf, but she caught on the security wire to the back fire door—which we keep armed—and yanked it out. She fell and tumbled right into Tyrone’s arms. When I got there, I don’t know who was happier, that kitten or Tyrone.”

“I guess you’re pretty happy, too, to know nobody’s breaking in.”

She laughed again. “I am. And the kittens are darling. We can’t keep them in the warehouse, obviously, but Tyrone wants the one he caught. Says he’s gonna name her Holly. I’m trying to find homes for two gray males. Do you reckon Ridd and Martha might take them? They could keep the mice down in their new barn.”

“We’ve already named them Mac and J.R.,” I heard her husband call in the background.

“I’ll ask Martha about the kittens,” I told her, “but you tell Jed for me that Ridd’s got two new pigs, and I’ve named them Jed and DuBose.”

When I hung up, I headed to the kitchen for a bowl of ice cream with hot fudge sauce. “One of these days I’m gonna diet,” I promised Lulu, who was hovering at my feet hoping she’d get a scoop of ice cream, too, “but I can’t as long as ice cream and hot fudge keep appearing in the refrigerator. You and I both know
I
don’t buy them.”

“You fixing ice cream?” called the culprit from the next room.

I fixed us each a bowl and gave Lulu a couple of spoonfuls, then let her out into the backyard. As I carried ours to the living room, I said, “If you’ll turn that thing off a minute, I’ll tell you what Meriwether said.”

The day would have ended on a cheerful note if the telephone hadn’t rung again.

“Oh, Mac, I’m so sorry to bother you this late.” It was Genna, breathless and flustered. “I meant to call you this afternoon, but things got hectic and I completely forgot.”

She scarcely gave my ears time to absorb one sentence before she was off and running with another. I was still getting my head around “hectic” as a description for her afternoon when she was halfway around another track. “. . . called and asked what I want Edie buried in. I can’t decide something like that! I mean, I wouldn’t have any idea what she’d like to wear. It won’t be an open casket, of course . . .”

My memory darted to Edie as I’d last seen her and I shuddered. No, it wouldn’t be an open casket.

I felt so dizzy, I pulled up a straight chair behind me and sat down. Genna was still rattling along.

“. . . don’t think I can stand to see the room yet. But they want them by ten tomorrow morning, and I understand you found her, so you’ve already been up there, so I wondered if maybe . . . I mean, I know it’s a lot to ask, but Cindy said she thought you might be willing to. If you don’t want to, just say so, but if you would, I would be eternally grateful. Adney would, too. I thought about asking Alex, but I don’t know her all that well, and Olive—she and Edie didn’t dress anything alike—”

“You want me to pick a dress for Edie to be buried in?” I’d finally pieced that much together.

“Oh, would you?” She acted like I’d offered, not merely asked for clarification. “That is wonderful! I am so grateful. If ever there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. This has all been so hard on Adney and me. We could not have gotten through it without you and your sweet family, and I want you to know that. We both appreciate you.”

That woman at the jail a few hours ago must have been Genna’s evil twin. Before I could say another word, Genna cooed, “The sheriff said they’re finished with the house, so I’ll meet you over there at eight tomorrow morning to let you in. Remember, the funeral home needs the outfit before ten. Thank you so much.”

I stood there holding a buzzing phone, wondering how different my life might have been if I’d mastered the fine art of manipulation.

On my way back to the sofa and my melting ice cream, I grumbled, “Genna’s conned me into picking out a dress for Edie to be buried in. You coming with me in the morning?”

“I told you, I’m going wherever you’re going.”

Which is why Genna met us both down at Edie’s the next morning. She unlocked the door, then turned to leave. “I’ve got an aerobics class, but if you’ll turn that little doohickey in the doorknob when you leave, I’ll come back later to lock the dead bolt.” Her fear of crime in the neighborhood seemed to have evaporated now that Edie had nothing left to steal.

Seeing Edie’s blue Saab in the carport had made me think, for one quick second, that the past week had been a bad dream and she’d be inside wondering why we were barging in without ringing the bell. I left my pocketbook with Joe Riddley, who elected to read the paper at the kitchen table. Just as I reached the stairs, I realized I hadn’t brought anything to carry the clothes in, so I went back to her pantry to hunt for a plastic bag. Like us, she kept a big bag of bags hanging on a pantry nail. As I grabbed one, I saw, behind the bag, a ring holding several keys. I wondered if the sheriff’s men had noticed it. I’d tell him later.

I climbed to Edie’s room with a heavy heart. It felt odd to wander around in her house without her permission. Before I climbed the last disheartening steps, I smelled the blood.

I’d smelled blood all my life, of course, growing up on a farm. On frosty autumn mornings Daddy used to butcher hogs down behind our house. Their blood on the breeze made my brother hop around in excitement, anticipating fresh livermush and bacon. This frosty morning, though, the scent of blood buckled my knees. I had to lean against the narrow stairwell wall for an instant to regain enough strength to keep climbing.

Even Isaac had been shaken by the room as he first saw it. “I’d never seen so much blood in one place,” he’d told me, his ebony face grave. Then he’d hurried to add, “But it’s gone now. The bedding and rug were bagged and taken away for evidence, and Pete’s wife, Daisy, has scrubbed everything, even the ceiling. You won’t see anything except an empty room.”

He’d forgotten how the smell of blood lingers, clinging to the very air, as if loath to let go of its hold on life.

I covered my mouth and nose with one hand and hoped the scent of almond lotion would see me through the ordeal.

I thought about calling to Joe Riddley in the kitchen below. But what would I say? That I was too sick at my stomach to enter a perfectly empty room to perform one last service for our friend? I certainly couldn’t ask him to pick out her burial clothes. We’d be holding a funeral where the guest of honor’s dress didn’t match her shoes—if the shoes matched each other. No, I owed it to her to see her decently buried. “I think I can, I think I can,” I chanted from one of Cricket’s favorite storybooks as I forced myself up the final five steps, wondering why any woman past fifty chose to sleep on the third floor.

Then I reached the threshold, stopped, and gasped.

What I saw was not a room of death, but an incredible view. Josiah had given his daughter a magnificent gift. The room rode the treetops like a ship on a green sea, and on a clear day you could probably see Augusta.

No wonder Edie had come back to this room when her husband died. It should have been her sanctuary, not the scene of her murder.

Then my eyes refocused on a few dark spots on the windows that Daisy had missed, and my breakfast gave fair warning it was coming back. I barely had time to dash into the dainty bathroom Josiah had installed in half of the back wall, next to the big walk-in closet.

Afterwards, I soaked a washrag and wiped my mouth. “You weren’t supposed to
die,
” I muttered angrily. “That wasn’t what we were worried about at all.”

Only my fury that this had happened to her—and at Genna’s halfhearted grief—sent me back into Edie’s room.

I stood looking around me, wondering if I might recognize any clues the sheriff’s people had missed. All I saw was a stripped bed, one teddy bear leaning against the wall under the bank of front windows, a jewelry box sitting crookedly on Edie’s dresser, and a collection of Hummel figurines on her chest of drawers. The carpet had been lifted, all the bedding and at least one chair removed. Light squares on the wallpaper showed where pictures had hung. Only the wall with the door to the stairs remained untouched. There, a bulletin board over Edie’s computer displayed several articles describing her winning bridge tournaments, and she kept her trophies in an old oak china cabinet in the corner that had probably held picture book dolls when she was younger.

Averting my eyes from the spots Daisy had missed on the windows, I raised several to let in fresh, cold air before I headed to the closet. I had only performed this service twice before, for my mother and Joe Riddley’s. Now, as then, I found myself teetering between practicality and respect for the dead. Should I choose a good outfit that somebody else could still get use out of, or pick something old and have people—in this case the funeral home staff—think we didn’t have proper respect?

Put me in any old thing, Mac, and give the good stuff to people who need it.
I could hear Edie saying it. Lately she’d been lobbying for the Magnolia Women’s Club to start a closet of gently used professional clothes for women going back to work. Maybe we could start it in her memory and begin it with her own clothes.

I was reaching for a navy suit she’d had for years when I heard somebody clumping up the stairs. So help me, my heart nearly stopped. I could tell it wasn’t Joe Riddley. “He had to let them come up,” I reminded myself.

Olive poked her head around the door. “Hey! I thought I’d find you up here.”

She paused as I had, but it wasn’t because she was sickened by the smell or entranced by the view. “Why on earth would Edie want to sleep all the way up here? Those stairs are a killer.”

Her eyes roved restlessly from the bare bed and floor to the lone teddy bear near the windows. “I guess that poor little fellow was too far away to get messed up.” She came to the closet like a slim dark shadow. “I didn’t know Genna was fixing to ask you to do this. You don’t need to bother. I can handle it.”

Until that minute, I’d have gladly handed the job over to the first volunteer. Now I was bound and determined Olive wouldn’t get it. I held the navy suit close to my chest. “Genna asked me to do it, and I’ve already chosen this.” I pulled out a tailored white blouse with a ruffle at the neck. It was businesslike and feminine, just like Edie. I bent and grabbed her navy pumps, remembering Edie wearing that same outfit to Wick’s funeral just last spring. A lump rose in my throat and threatened to choke me.

Olive wrinkled her nose. “Those old things? Why don’t you—?” She reached past me to pull out one of Edie’s really nice dresses, a swirl of pink, green, and magenta silk from the days when she and Wick flew to New York for plays. Olive held it up against her sallow face and sashayed over to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. She preened a little at the picture she made. “Edie had good taste, when she chose to exercise it.”