Guess Who's Coming to Die? Page 5

  We all swiveled to look at Rachel. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that drops of moisture on her hair had caught the light like diamonds while she was listening to Gusta talk about little Zach.

  “I went to my car,” she explained. “I had left a tray here at a luncheon last week, and wanted to take it out so I wouldn’t forget it later.” That sounded harmless enough, so why did she sound like she was defying us to correct her?

  “Did you see Mrs. Walker Yarbrough out there?” The chief jerked his head toward Cindy.

  Rachel hesitated. “No, I didn’t. She wasn’t on the porch or steps out front when I went out or came back in.” She threw Cindy an apologetic glance.

  Cindy’s lips twitched in annoyance. “I went down past the big red-tip bush to get a better signal. I saw you, though. Talking to Grover.” The last three words sounded like an accusation.

  “Me, too,” Sadie Lowe said in a voice like a cat’s purr.

  Rachel’s nostrils flared. “He had something he wanted to give me. A prospectus. We came right back in. And I didn’t see either one of you.” She glowered at Sadie Lowe.

  “I was down at the far end of the porch in the dark,” Sadie Lowe told her. “Maybe you smelled my smoke?”

  Rachel shook her head. Sadie Lowe shrugged and gave the chief a smile that visibly raised his blood pressure.

  “How did you get back in?” I asked Rachel. “Wasn’t the front door locked?”

  Rachel shook her head. “Cindy must have unlocked it.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Cindy objected. “I didn’t even think about it when I went out.”

  “So somebody from outside could have gotten in!” Wilma peered at the door anxiously.

  The chief scratched his chin. “Coulda been a tramp,” he agreed. “I’ll check with Dexter.” He looked around the room again, as if taking inventory. “That’s everybody, then, except Miss Augusta and the judge, who found the body. I think we all will agree Miss Augusta is innocent.”

  Innocent wasn’t a word I’d apply to Gusta, given some of her past history, but I let it go. Some of the others were looking at me as if finding a body constituted creating one.

  Wilma raised a weak hand and let it drop. “Nancy Jensen, our treasurer, was here, too, but she had to go home early. She got sick.”

  “Did she leave the room?”

  Wilma hesitated. “For a minute or two.”

  “It was much longer than that.” Gusta was rubbing one of her vein-knotted hands over the other. I didn’t know if she was worried or if her arthritis was bothering her.

  “Nancy is chairing the golf club committee annual dinner this year,” Meriwether explained quickly. “She said she wanted to look at the ballroom to get some idea of how she might decorate the tables.”

  “Did anybody notice when Mrs. Jensen left or how long she was gone?” The chief made the question sound like an accusation.

  Nobody spoke. Finally I said, “I don’t know when she left, but she came back in here as I went out.”

  “She told me she didn’t feel well and was going home,” MayBelle added.

  I had the feeling most of the women were holding their breath.

  “I saw her come out the front door and look around, then she went right back in,” Cindy volunteered. “Then right before I came in, she ran down the steps to her car.”

  The chief raised his eyebrows. “None of you knows if she went to the ladies’ room?”

  We all shook our heads. He stood there turning all that over in what passes for his mind. Finally he came to the conclusion I’d expected him to reach all along. “What it boils down to”—his sharp polecat gaze flickered as he looked straight at me—“is that Mrs. Jensen needs to account for her time, Mrs. Walker Yarbrough has a stretch of time when she was supposedly out on the sidewalk in the streaming rain making a call but nobody saw her, and Judge Yarbrough found the body.”

  That got Cindy and me a lot of glances we neither wanted nor needed, but they were nothing compared to the grief Joe Riddley would give me when I got home. There was no way he was going to admit it was his fault I’d found Willena.

  The chief rolled smoothly on. “Mrs. Brandison, as the last person known to leave the ladies’ room before the judge found the body, are you certain Miss Kenan was alive at that point?”

  MayBelle stood to her full height and gave him the look she gives contractors who don’t fulfill their contracts. “Very much alive. She told me to make sure Wilma saved her some crabmeat cheese puffs for her to eat tomorrow when . . .” The words she felt better hung over us.

  “They all got eaten,” Wilma wailed — as if that made any difference now. After somebody dies, the strangest things pierce you.

  “Mac was here when MayBelle came back in,” Gusta informed the chief, looking down her nose at him. “She was refilling her punch cup for the third time.”

  Trust Gusta to have counted. Still, I appreciated it when she added, “Then she talked a long time with Grover Henderson and ate a couple of brownies. I saw her leave, and she wasn’t gone long enough to kill anybody.”

  “It wouldn’t have taken long,” the chief assured her. He looked around at the group of women. “Who is this Grover Henderson, and where is he now?”

  The entire group looked toward Wilma. She threw MayBelle a silent, piteous plea.

  MayBelle had been taking charge of things all her life. She took charge of explaining Grover now. “He’s a stockbroker who comes down from Augusta to talk about investing each month. He left when the refreshment break was over. Since he has so far to drive and is a single parent with a teenage son, he has asked to be excused from the last part of the meeting, when we decide what to invest in. Nancy Jensen, our financial partner, usually calls him the next day and tells him what to buy for us.”

  That was all true, but it didn’t tell Chief Muggins anything about the effect Grover had on women. He had come in that evening a little late. MayBelle had immediately sailed over to meet him and put a proprietary hand on his arm. As he went to the podium, Nancy Jensen — who sat on the front row — had let her skirt ride up to expose her big knees. Willena had stepped up to share whatever it was that made him laugh. Wilma sat through his whole presentation with a foolish simper on her face, then asked such a dumb question that anybody could tell she primarily wanted his attention. Willena had leaned over and whispered loudly, “Don’t go making such a fool of yourself.” Rachel had gone outside with him during the break, and I’d seen Sadie Lowe give him several of her special come-hither smiles. Only Gusta, Cindy, Meriwether, and I seemed unaffected by his charm.

  “Can you give me his address and phone number?” Chief Muggins asked.

  “Grover wouldn’t!” Wilma yelped. She turned and flung herself onto MayBelle, sobbing noisily. I didn’t particularly like Wilma, but I sincerely pitied her. Willena had been like a baby sister to her, and they were the last of the Kenans.

  Even crusty old Gusta made a small grunt of compassion, while MayBelle patted Wilma’s shoulder and said, over and over, “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”

  Chief Muggins hooked his thumbs in his belt. “At the moment I am leaning toward the conclusion that somebody slipped in while Mrs. Walker Yarbrough was down off the porch”—he put extra emphasis on those last three words—“and that we’ll find evidence of that on the scene. I know all of you ladies and where to find you. Please don’t leave town without checking with me. I’ll want to talk with some of you again tomorrow. Will that be acceptable?”

  If looks could wither a person, he’d have withered under mine like a roach under pesticide. He wouldn’t have been asking if his tactics were acceptable if he’d had a batch of welfare mothers in that room. He wouldn’t have been letting them go home, either.

  “I don’t have a ride,” Wilma whimpered. “I came with Willena.”

  MayBelle took her arm. “Come on. I’ll drive you home. Will Linette and Lincoln be back yet?” When Wilma shook her head, MayBelle told the rest of us, �
�I’ll stay until they get there.”

  Folks with raincoats had left them spread on chairs out in the tiled hall, to save the meeting room carpet. I helped Gusta put on a practical gray all-weather coat. Meriwether had a floral raincoat with a matching umbrella. Rachel donned a large black cape that made her look like Zorro. Sadie Lowe had a transparent raincoat that showed off her outfit.

  “Let me get on my rain boots,” Wilma insisted to nobody in particular. “I don’t want these shoes to get ruined.” Not one soul who knew her was surprised that Wilma was worrying about yellow shoes while her cousin lay dead. She took a pair of clear plastic shoes that fit over other shoes from a large cloth carryall and sat to pull them on. They were still wet and muddy from carrying in refreshments before the meeting. She then put on a soft yellow raincoat, opened an umbrella patterned after an impressionist painting, and picked up the bulky carryall.

  That whole time Maybelle was prowling up and down the hall demanding, “What the hell happened to my raincoat? Has anybody seen it? It’s rust brown, and I left it right there.” She pointed to an empty chair.

  A murmur of denial filled the hall.

  I sidled over to Charlie and murmured, “Rust brown would conceal bloodstains real well, don’t you think? I hope you all will look good for that coat.”

  He frowned, but called to one of the deputies, “Thad, would you take a description of her coat, in case we come across it?”

  I wasn’t through. “If she was throwing up like that, maybe somebody gave her poison or something.”

  He looked down his nose. “The woman was obviously stabbed, Judge. You saw her yourself. You stick to your bench and leave the detecting to me.”

  I wanted to say, I would, if you’d do any detecting, but he was already moving away, and I had two more things to say. “Shouldn’t we all get tested for bloodstains and stick around until you take fingerprints from the ladies’ room? And don’t you want to check for footprints in the hall before we tramp all over it?”

  He waved my first suggestion aside like a polecat batting flies. “No need to inconvenience anybody, Judge,” he assured me. I was about to point out that murder is generally inconvenient when he at least paid attention to the last thing I said. He raised his voice and called, “If you would, please go down the back hall here and leave the building by the far side hall, so you don’t mess up any possible footprints up near the ladies’ room.”

  That was the first time I ever heard a police chief worry about inconveniencing a possible murderer. But what the heck? If he was willing to let us go, who was I to argue?

  I should have known it wasn’t going to be that easy. As I hefted my pocketbook over one shoulder, he held up one hand. “Oh, Judge? I’d appreciate it if you and Miss Cindy would stay behind for a minute.”

  6

  All he wanted was to embarrass us in front of the others.

  He took us back into the Wainwright Meeting Room and took me over my story again. What could I tell him except to repeat what I had already said: that I’d gone to the bathroom and found Willena as soon as I opened the door?

  I didn’t bother to add that since I had never gotten to use the bathroom, I was in serious discomfort by now. The office of judge requires a certain bit of decorum. Still, I hoped he’d finish with us soon and let us go.

  Instead, he turned to Cindy and started questioning her again. “Don’t you think it’s a little odd for somebody to stand for thirty minutes out in the rain trying to call kids?”

  “I had an umbrella,” she repeated. “If you’ll go check, you’ll see it’s sopping wet. My daughter was on the phone—she’s thirteen—and I couldn’t get through for a while.”

  “Don’t you folks have call waiting?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t pick up.”

  I could have told him that when Cindy is trying to reach her children when they’re at home alone, a hurricane or tornado wouldn’t deter her, but I decided to keep my mouth shut. The sooner they finished, the sooner we could go.

  As Robert Burns once remarked, however, the best-laid plans of mice and men go “aft agley.” A deputy foiled our escape by coming in to announce, “We found a raincoat, Chief, spattered with something that looks like blood.”

  Chief Muggins turned with the eagerness of a bantam rooster eyeing dinner. “Where was it?”

  “In a trash can at the back of the building, balled up and shoved in. It’s a kind of brown-red color, so it’s hard to tell what has spattered it.”

  Cindy caught a quick, short breath.

  Chief Muggins heard and whirled in our direction. “One of yours?”

  I shook my head. “Neither of us brought a raincoat. Cindy brought an umbrella and came into our garage to get me, so I didn’t think to bring anything. But I’d bet that’s the one MayBelle was asking about before she left. Sounds like hers.”

  “Could you identify it?” Chief Muggins asked us.

  I hesitated, but Cindy nodded. “I think so.”

  “Bring it in,” he commanded the deputy.

  The deputy returned carrying the coat in gloved hands. It was a gory sight, the front covered with spatters and one wide stream of dark brown.

  I’ve seen gruesome things in my day, but they always make me queasy. I swallowed hard. Cindy turned green. “Yeah, that’s hers.” She clutched her mouth and headed for the kitchen. We heard her being violently ill, then water running in the sink.

  “Don’t mess up evidence,” the chief shouted in to her.

  “You were the one who insisted she look at the coat,” I reminded him. “Willena was a friend of hers.”

  As soon as I’d said it, a chill rose from my feet toward my heart. Cindy and Willena were in a lot of clubs and organizations together, but they were anything but friends.

  Willena had disliked Cindy ever since Cindy joined our local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter. Willena and Wilma, as chapter members with the most confirmed ancestors who had fought in the Revolution, had pretty much run things their way until then, but Cindy’s family had been active in the DAR for generations, and she had started attending DAR meetings and conventions with her mother and grandmother before she could walk. When Willena asked the Hopemore chapter to provide funds for a memorial marker and stone for her maternal many-times-great-grandfather to replace a stone that had been vandalized, Cindy asked for verification that he had fought in the Revolution. Willena brushed that off, pointing out that while there was some doubt that he had actually fought, he had lived in Georgia during that period and supported the cause of freedom. Cindy then reminded her that DAR chapter funds can be used only for markers on the graves of actual Revolutionary soldiers.

  She wasn’t casting aspersions on Willena’s membership. Willena had plenty of qualifying ancestors. Nevertheless, Willena got furious. Especially when they checked the bylaws and she was forced to admit that Cindy was right. Ever since then, Willena had smiled and said sweet things to Cindy in public, but she carried daggers behind her eyes and fought Cindy tooth and nail over points that would never have mattered to anybody else.

  Tonight, after Grover had given his presentation and Nancy had given the treasurer’s report, Cindy got a puzzled wrinkle between her brows. “Why do we have so much money in the treasury? Didn’t we vote last month to spend four thousand dollars?”

  Gusta had leaned over to me and said in what I guess she thought was an inaudible murmur, “We voted to buy stock in the insurance company Walker works for. Good buy, too. It’s gone up two dollars a share this month.”

  I knew that. I own some, not only because it shows confidence in our son to own stock in the company he represents, but because insurance companies these days are run largely for the benefit of shareholders instead of the insured, so I figure that owning stock is the only way to recoup some of my overpriced premiums.

  After Gusta spoke, the room had grown still. Nancy looked toward Willena, and Willena stood behind the table watching her hands fiddle with her pen. Finally she
looked up with an apologetic little smile that was about as sincere as a car salesman’s handshake. “I told Nancy to hold off on that purchase until we could discuss it further. We have never had a policy about investing in companies for which our members or their husbands work, but I think we ought to. We don’t want to get into the problem of conflict of interest.”

  I had taken a quick mental poll. Gusta, Willena, Wilma, Rachel, and Sadie Lowe were not married. Gusta, Willena, Wilma, and Sadie Lowe were not employed. Rachel was a lawyer, as was Meriwether’s husband. Meriwether, MayBelle, Nancy’s husband, and I all owned businesses, but they were privately held, so none of them had stock for sale. Cindy was the only person there whose husband worked for a company that traded on the stock exchange.

  Cindy must have been doing the same calculations I was, because she objected, “You’ve bought stock over the years in DuBose Trucking, Wainwright Textile Mills, and Kenan Cotton Factors. Has this ever been an issue before?” Her eyes were flashing, her cheeks pink. She was no longer addressing Willena but the whole group, a new member asking to know the group’s history. Most of the members were already shaking their heads.