Pinned for Murder (21 page)

She squeezed his hand as his voice faltered a smidge, the relatively unexpected loss of his father surely compounding the grief over losing his wife to cancer. But if Milo was still hurting from Celia’s death, he hid it well. “It sounds nice. I’d like to see all of it the next time I’m at your house.”

“Which we can Tuesday . . . if you’re free. My mom called last night. She’s coming for a visit and she wants to meet you.”

“Really?”

Milo laughed. “Trust me. From the moment I first mentioned you, she’s been trying to orchestrate a meeting.”

“Why did it take so long?” She stopped as they approached the booth, her curiosity in overdrive.

“Because I didn’t want to scare you away.”

“Meeting your mom wouldn’t have scared me.”

“A week after we started dating . . . yes, it would have. Trust me on this. She’d been trying to encourage me to get out in the world again within a year of Celia’s death. When ten years slipped by, she was convinced I’d shut down on life.”

“Had you?” she asked, the subject making her voice unnaturally quiet.

“No. You just hadn’t found your way to Sweet Briar yet.”

She looked up at him through lashes that were suddenly tear dappled. “Do you really mean that?”

“You have no idea,” he whispered against her ear. Wrapping his arms around her, he gave her a tight squeeze. “She’s going to love you just like I do.”

For several long moments they simply stood there, the crowd sifting around them as they held each other close. Eventually his arms relaxed and she stepped back, turning toward the booth. “Looks like they’ve got a little bit of a line.”

“Good. That means word’s getting out. Especially now that we’ve got the room—both in the booth and the new chests—to store some outgoing items for those who really need it right now.”

As they rounded the far corner of the booth, Tori stopped, a smile stretching across her face. “Rose!”

The elderly woman turned, dark circles framing her bottom eyelids. “Victoria.” Leaning forward for a kiss, the woman thwarted her intention as a cough rattled her frail frame. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here. I told that to Dixie”—she poked a bony finger into the arm of the woman next to her—“but she wouldn’t listen.”

Tori turned her smile in Dixie’s direction, her gratitude for her predecessor’s accomplishments impossible to hide. “I’m glad she didn’t. Sweet Briar has missed seeing you out and about.”

“Well they better get their fill now. Dixie has but ten more minutes and then I’m heading home, with or without her. Even if that means I have to walk the whole way.”

“Quit your complainin’, Rose. I told you we’d head home after this. You’d do well to remember I did you a favor bringing you tonight. Ellie might have given that flag order to someone else had you not been here. They don’t come in all that often, as you well know, so just quit, will you? I need to drop off this food.” The woman hoisted two bags onto the booth’s counter. “Been saving them for a while now, waiting for this festival to hurry up and happen.”

Buoyed by the first real hope she’d felt in a while where Rose was concerned, she turned back to Milo, pointing at the large stand-up sheds on either side of the booth. “Are those the chests for the food?”

“They sure are. And they’re perfect.” He looked at Dixie. “I understand from Georgina that the idea came from you?”

The woman thrust her shoulders back. “It did.”

“Well, then a thank-you is in order. It was exactly what we needed.” He opened Dixie’s bag and began sorting the cans for the volunteers behind the counter who were busy with other items. “Between that, and the anonymous donation . . . it was meant to be, I guess.”

“You mean the donation that came via Martha Jane’s money?” Dixie asked.

Rose’s shoulders slumped.

Tori rushed to change the subject, her desire to make the outing a positive experience for Rose front and center. “So, are you enjoying the festival this year, Dixie?”

Obviously oblivious to her efforts, Dixie continued, her monotone voice drowning out the sounds of the crowd. “Well, if nothing else, at least Kenny was listening all those years ago in your class, Rose.”

The retired teacher slowly turned. “What are you saying?”

“It’s simple. You read Robin Hood with your class back then, didn’t you?” Dixie asked, her arms crossed in front of her chest in authoritative fashion.

Rose slowly nodded as Milo’s head slumped forward between his shoulders with a groan.

“Well, he certainly took the notion of robbing from the rich to a whole new level, didn’t he?”

Chapter 19

She simply watched as Rose made her way into the sunroom, the elderly woman’s slipper-clad feet shuffling across the floor at a snail’s pace. Her posture, weighed down by age, seemed worse than normal, her shoulders stooped forward as if they were attached to a moving cable not more than a foot in front of her toes.

“You know how Dixie is, she’s quick to speak and slow to think. And if I remember correctly, you’re the one who told me that shortly after I moved here.” Tori leaned forward, rested her elbows on her thighs and her chin on tented fingers. “I don’t think she meant to be nasty, I really don’t. I suspect she just thought she was being clever.”

“Well, she’s not,” Rose snapped as she stopped in front of her fabric closet and flung the door wide. “Can you imagine the nerve of that woman suggesting that I somehow taught Kenny to do the things he’s done? That I encouraged him to rob an old woman and then strangle her to death?”

“No.” Because she couldn’t. Especially when the woman making the suggestion was supposed to be Rose’s friend. Could Dixie really be that blind to the fact that Rose was struggling right now? That she was questioning her impact on a man she poured her blood, sweat, and tears into for three decades?

But she knew the answer even before the questions stopped lining up in her thoughts. Dixie was clueless when it came to the feelings of anyone but herself. It wasn’t that she was deliberately mean. She just hadn’t been shown a better way. Or if she had, she hadn’t taken very thorough notes.

“I knew I should have resisted when she showed up on my doorstep begging me to go to the festival with her. I didn’t want to go. I just wanted to sit in here and sew, that’s all. But she played on my sense of loyalty—claiming she needed to get out, to get a little fresh air in her lungs but was reluctant to do it without a friend. She said she was afraid someone would jostle her in the crowd.”

“And they wouldn’t jostle you? You’re certainly more frail. . . .” The words trailed from her mouth as they registered in her ears. She jumped to her feet, closed the gap between them in two quick strides. “Rose, I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did. It’s just that I’ve been worried about you—”

The woman’s bony hand lifted into the air and pointed at the top shelf. “Do you see that bolt of pale blue fabric up there?”

Tori followed the line from Rose’s finger, her cheeks still warm from her blunder. “Uhhh . . . yes. Would you like me to get it down for you?”

“Yes. Please.” Rose bent at the waist, a loud cough rattling her tiny body with such force she took hold of the door for support.

“Rose? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” she snapped after temporarily clearing her lungs. “Just get me down that fabric, will you?”

She did as she was told, grabbing hold of the silky weather resistant fabric with two hands. “Where would you like me to put it?”

“Over there, on my cutting table,” Rose instructed before turning in the same direction herself, a pair of sharp fabric scissors clutched tightly in her hand. “I think Dixie just has green eyes. Always has, always will.”

Tori set the fabric on the cutting table, then stepped to the side, her eyes trained on Rose. “Green eyes?”

“Like the green-eyed monster.”

“Ahhh, I get it now.” She marveled at the way the woman’s tremor-filled hands stilled the moment she touched a pair of scissors or a tape measure or even a needle. It was as if her body needed a sewing task to remember its youthful qualities.

“I remember when I was first teaching at the school. When a class of children would visit the library, Dixie was the only one who could read the week’s books. If she got a call or had to address a question from a patron, the children had to wait. The classroom teacher couldn’t pick up where Dixie had left off.”

Sensing her friend’s need to talk, she simply nodded and kept listening.

“If I was recognized with an award of some kind, she always talked about the one she’d earned that was bigger and better. And if a student would come up to me when we were out and about, she’d cut in and remind the child of the last time he or she was at the library.”

Rose rolled out her tape measure and stretched it across the fabric, her fingers instinctively reaching for a series of pins to mark the desired length. “Just tonight, when Ellie came over to ask me to make a new flag, you could see Dixie fuming, wondering why Ellie was asking me and not her. And do you know what she did?” Without waiting for an answer the woman continued on, her hand guiding the scissors through the fabric with ease. “She cut me off when I tried to answer by apologizing to Ellie for not having the time to make it . . . trying to make it seem as if she’d been asked first.”

She suspected she knew the answer, yet she asked anyway. “Had she?”

Rose peered up, the scissors a mere snip away from completing their cut. “If the way Ellie’s eyebrows scrunched up in confusion was any indication—and I’m quite sure it was—then the answer is no.”

“I guess it’s jealousy, like you said. Maybe even a self-esteem issue. Some people with low self-esteem climb into their shell and spend the bulk of their life looking outward from some safe place they’ve created. And then there’s others who try to inflate it by tearing down everyone else.”

“Like Dixie.”

“Like Dixie,” she repeated, stepping back from the table to give Rose as much room as she needed to rewind the remaining fabric onto the bolt. When it was ready, Tori returned it to its place on the top shelf of the closet. “But knowing that doesn’t make the things she does any easier, does it?”

“It should, but it doesn’t.” Rose pulled her sewing box across the table and flipped its lid open. Reaching inside, she selected an array of colors and lined them up beside her favorite sewing chair. “But this time her green eyes hurt Kenny, too.”

“How so?”

“By assuming the worst just like everyone else.” Rose stared down at the pale blue fabric, her hands beginning to show signs of their tremor once again. “Everyone is convinced he murdered Martha Jane.”

“I know.”

Slowly, she grabbed hold of the cut fabric and carried it to her chair. “I even had my doubts for a little while. The more people commented on his temper, the more I saw it, too. But I know that young man. I know him as if he was my own flesh and blood.”

Tori sat down beside Rose and patted the woman’s hand. “I know you two are close.”

“I’m not blind, Victoria. I know he has a temper—a bad one. And I know he has socialization issues and learning challenges, but he has always had a good heart. I don’t believe that just disappeared in one horrible moment.”

“One horrible moment,” she repeated in a whisper as her thoughts traveled back to the very day Martha Jane was murdered, to a conversation Rose hadn’t been privy to . . .

“She might not say sorry to someone dumb like me . . . but someone dumb like me can make her sorry. Real sorry.”

She closed her eyes against the memory, Kenny’s anger-filled words shooting a hole right through Rose’s assertion that he may have committed the crime in a split-second spasm of anger.

But as damning as his words were in relation to Martha Jane’s murder later that same evening, there were still things that didn’t add up. Things that continued to nag at her subconscious every chance they got.

Like the perfect donation amount that was allowing her to get exactly what she wanted in order to finally complete the children’s room . . .

The woman coughed again, the sound a heartbreaking reminder of the cruelty that was age. “Rose? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Victoria. Really. I’m just having a hard time kicking this cold. It’s what happens when you get old.” This time Rose’s reply was more appreciative in nature, the resentment she’d exuded earlier at the same question a distant memory. “I love the symbols on our flag, they represent us so perfectly.”

Tori cocked her head and waited for the woman to bring her up to speed, her thoughts still weighed down by thoughts of Kenny.

“I thought the flames would bother me after that little revelation Colby unearthed, but it doesn’t. Now, instead of feeling anger toward the Yankees, I see that there’s no trial that can’t be overcome . . . even something as destructive as fire.”

Flames.
Flames . . .

“Oh! I know what you’re talking about now.” She grabbed hold of the brick-colored embroidery floss and turned it over in her hands. “And this is for the three bricks that—”

“Six. Six bricks.”

“Uhhh, yeah, okay.” She shrugged off her mistake, mentally replacing the bad information with the good for future use. “They represent the rebuilding phase, right?”