Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man? (30 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

BOOK: Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man?
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“I can’t walk.” He clutched the walker defiantly. “Anybody can see I can’t walk. My legs got hurt.”
“Your legs are fine,” Darren reminded him. “It was your head that got hurt.”
“My head doesn’t hurt a bit.” Joe Riddley knocked on the side of it to show us how solid it was. Startled, Joe spread his wings and flew to the lowest branch of Joe Riddley’s little birthday oak. He perched there swaying on the frail branches.
“Come here, bird.” Joe Riddley held out his arm.
Joe didn’t budge.
“Come here, I said,” Joe Riddley demanded.
Joe didn’t budge.
“I’m coming after you,” Joe Riddley warned.
Still Joe didn’t budge.
Joe Riddley pivoted away from his walker and walked five normal steps to the tree. “Get on that arm,” he ordered, holding it out.
Joe hopped the short distance to his arm. “Good boy. Good boy,” he squawked.
Darren and I hugged in pure joy.
Joe Riddley looked around and saw us. “Boy, let go of my wife. Little Bit, bring me my walker. Why’d you take it way over there? You know I can’t walk a step without it.”
26
Clarinda had baked a big chocolate cake, so that evening while Darren was settling Joe Riddley for the night, I decided to run part of it over to Meriwether with a package of stew and some of Ridd’s garden vegetables from my freezer.
Jed’s car sat in the driveway. I would have driven back home and gone another time, but I might be needed to sign a warrant after one of them killed the other.
Almost as soon as I rang the bell, Jed opened the door. “Hello! Come to see the wounded? She had a fight with the doctor and lost.” He padded to the living room in his sock feet, apparently making himself right at home.
Poor Meriwether lay on the couch with her leg encased in an elaborate contraption of nylon and straps that started at her ankle and disappeared up her khaki skirt. She greeted me with a sour grimace. “The doctor says I have to wear this four weeks, maybe six. And I’m not to put weight on the leg that whole time.”
“I’m so sorry. Will this put a crimp in starting your business?”
“I’d already had a crimp. The workmen have another job to finish, so they’re taking a week off from my warehouse. They promise it’ll be ready to receive shipments by our agreed-on date, though.” She waved me to a chair. “At least I can offer you a seat.”
The living room had blossomed in peach, blue, and green with touches of burgundy. A new couch and two new chairs were augmented by lamps and tables I recognized from Gusta’s. Several of her paintings hung on the walls and one of her Chinese carpets softened the wooden floor.
The large blue chair had Jed’s loafers beside it, so I took the smaller peach one. “It’s lovely, honey. Has Gusta come to see all this?”
“She sure did, and deigned to say the place looks charming for such a little house.”
“Good for Gusta. She may mellow before she gets old.”
Jed leaned over from his chair and took one of Meriwether’s hands. “She’s not the only one doing some mellowing. Meriwether and I have declared a truce.”
I looked at them and ached for what could have been. Maybe it was because Joe Riddley and I met when we were so young, but I’d always had an extra soft spot for those two. They’d met at our church preschool, when she was a curly-headed four and he a towheaded five. Her family’s donations paid his full scholarship, but neither of them knew that. Through their school years they were always together. A friend from India said about her happy marriage, arranged at birth to a boy she grew up with, “You treat somebody differently when you know all your life you are going to marry him.” I knew what she meant. I’d gone through it with Joe Riddley and watched it between Meriwether and Jed.
However, Meriwether had a fortune and Jed was a Blaine. Somewhere around fourth grade, that fact reared its ugly head. It wasn’t poverty, and it wasn’t dirt. Helena kept her child scrubbed within an inch of his life, and I made sure he wore decent clothes, passing down all Walker outgrew, and Walker was a fussy dresser. It was little things—birthday parties to which he wasn’t invited, social events he didn’t know had happened until they were over.
The year she was nine, he asked what she wanted for Christmas and she said, “A gold locket with your picture,” with the blissful ignorance of a child who’d always gotten anything she wanted. He came into my office that afternoon asking if I had any work he could do to earn money to buy a gold locket. I knew he’d never earn enough to buy the kind of locket her family and friends would admire. Worried about that, I confided in Pooh.
As I had hoped, she found a solution. “I’ve got a child’s locket that belonged to my little sister. Let me see if Lottie can find it.” We agreed Jed would rake her leaves for two weeks to earn it, and he was glad to do it. Meriwether loved the locket, wore it everywhere. But Pooh and I knew we couldn’t always rescue him.
Through high school, though, Meriwether continued to have a mind of her own. She defied both Gusta and Garlon to go with Jed to every dance, every football game, and every party. She was perfectly happy sipping milkshakes with him at Hardee’s while her friends danced at the country club. Jed was her escort when she was homecoming queen, and she went to Georgia Wesleyan because he was at Mercer.
During their college years, even Joe Riddley started to worry about how Jed could support Meriwether in the style she was used to, but at spring break of her junior year they came by the store, glowing. “Jed’s been accepted to Mercer Law School next fall,” she told us proudly.
“And we’re getting married the next summer,” he added. “We’ll be poor at first, but one day I can give her anything.” At that point all he could give her was a diamond so tiny it looked like the head of a pin.
“I don’t want anything except him,” she assured us.
They planned an August wedding. Then, right before her graduation, we heard the wedding was off. Meriwether came home and turned to Georgia granite if anyone so much as mentioned his name. The closest she’d come to saying what happened was once when she told me, “You’re lucky all your family likes each other.”
That all ran through my head in far less time than it takes to tell it, while they sat and smiled at one another. Finally he asked her a silent question and she nodded with a smile. “We’re getting married the week before Christmas,” he informed me. “You’re the first to know.”
I held on to the arms of my chair in case it started levitating. “What happened?”
Meriwether looked like she used to, not merely charming but radiant. “He stayed under my skin all these years, I guess. And Sunday night when I fell and he came to help me, looking so worried, I knew his feelings hadn’t changed, either.”
“You threw salad at him,” I reminded her.
Jed guffawed. “She was saying she loved me. We used to have food fights all the time, starting in junior high. Just little ones—we never disrupted the cafeteria. But throwing a small piece of food and saying ‘it’s all your fault’ was our secret code. As soon as she lobbed me with that lettuce, I knew things were going to be all right. That’s why I threw the pie crust back.” Their expressions would have made me sick if I weren’t a sentimental old softie.
“I figured I’d better let the editor take her to the hospital, though,” Jed added. “I didn’t want to make a scene. So I came over after she got home, and we got things straight between us.”
“Have you told Gusta?”
“Not yet,” Meriwether began.
“But we’re working up our courage.” He rubbed one cheek with his palm. “I wish I could find out who my daddy was before we tell her. Do you know anything—anything at all, Mac?”
“I always figured Helena found you under a bush.”
“Or floating down the river in a basket. But if she didn’t?”
I shook my head doubtfully. “I don’t know. We all assumed he was in the Air Force, or another civilian at Warner Robbins, but she never said. His name isn’t on your birth certificate?”
He leaned forward and clasped his hands between his knees. “No, but Hiram kept hinting at something for the past several months. The first time was when I took him up to see my offices.” Seeing my startled look, he laughed. “Oh, I took him after work. I wouldn’t expose the firm’s partners or clients to Hiram. But anyway, he looked around and nodded like a wise old owl, and he said, ‘Boy, you done got where you was born to be.’ I thought at the time he meant I’d gotten what I went to law school for, but every time we met after that he’d say things like, ‘Your daddy and mama would be real proud of you’ or ‘If Miss High and Mighty knew what I know, she’d climb off her high horse and beg you to marry her granddaughter.’ ”
Jed rumpled Meriwether’s hair and she swatted him playfully. “Not unless your daddy was a president she voted for.”
“Hey, I aim that high.” He leaned over and kissed her.
“Hiram never told you anything else?” I asked, to remind them I was there.
He went back to his chair. “Nothing I could understand. Several times I said, ‘Hiram, tell me what you know.’ But he’d screw up his mouth and promise, ‘I’ll tell you sometime.’ He never said what he was waiting for. Probably for Martians to land.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “And he might have been making it up.”
“Maybe. But he told me all sorts of things I didn’t know before. Like, he said Hector threw a fit when Mama brought home another mouth to feed, and wanted her to take me back where I belonged.”
“As if Hector ever did a lick of work to feed you,” I said sourly.
“You got that right. But Hiram said they fought about it a lot at first, until Hector had to go do some time—his first stint in jail, I think.”
“Yeah, that was about the time Helena came to work for us. You were around a year old, not walking yet, and Hiram volunteered to look after you.”
“Oh, no!” Meriwether exclaimed.
I chuckled. “That’s what Helena and I said, too. We scurried around pretty smart finding somebody else to keep Jed, then we told Hiram that Helena got free child care with her job.” She did, too, until he entered preschool, but I didn’t bother to tell them that. I just added, “Hiram was real put out with us for not leaving you with him.”
Jed chuckled. “He told me he never minded having a little bugger around the house, and was always glad Mama got to keep me.”
“The fact that he said Helena ‘got to keep’ you”—Meri wether took her hand from Jed’s long enough to sketch quotation marks—“makes me wonder if she was even your mother.”
“Have you asked Hector about this since you got back?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he said, ‘Helena never told me a
thang,
’ which is true. He and Mama never got along, and she never spoke to him unless she had to.”
“Which brings us back to the bush,” I joked.
“I hope it was a bush with decent family roots. You don’t think anybody would have killed Hiram to keep him from telling me who I am, do you?”
“That’s pretty far-fetched. We don’t run to missing royalty in Hopemore. Now if it had been
Hiram
claiming to be their relative, I can see the point in somebody’s getting him out of the way. But you clean up real good. Any family would be proud to own you.”
“Except one,” he said ruefully.
Meriwether leaned over and punched him. “Don’t be mean. I told you I’ll marry you this time, Nana or no Nana.”
My opportunity had come. I could be the first in Hope County to know. “Was Gusta the reason you didn’t get married before?”
Meriwether nodded, and Jed shook his head. “You can’t both be right,” I informed them.
“Nana was objecting, and I begged Jed to wait until she came around.”
“But she doesn’t get to take all the blame.” Jed squeezed her hand. “I told Meriwether Miss Gusta would never agree to her marrying me, and we’d have to do it in spite of her whenever we did it. She begged me to wait one more year, and I got on my own high horse and said if she wouldn’t marry me when we planned to do it, it was off.” He groaned. “We were such fools. How could I have been so dumb?”
“Hardheaded,” I told him. “Your daddy must be southern, at least. Southern men have heads harder than the granite beneath our soil.”
For several minutes we sat in silence. They held hands and looked at each other like they couldn’t get enough of it. Jed was so happy his freckles glowed. I don’t know what they were thinking but I was thinking about twelve wasted years. Their children could be up in school by now. I was so busy picturing little girls with Meriwether’s green eyes and curls and little boys with Jed’s freckles—except the boys would probably get the curls and the girls the freckles—that I was startled when Jed heaved a big sigh and said softly, “I think Mama really was my mother. At least my birth certificate tells us that.”
“You’re lucky to have a birth certificate at all,” I informed him. “Helena lost your first one, and had to get a new one when you started school. A friend of hers in the courthouse helped, I remember, and they had trouble locating the original. Finally Helena had to swear an affidavit, and—”

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