When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (19 page)

“Retire,” I suggested. “Maynard doesn’t want or need the store, so you don’t have to pass it along. Hold an enormous sale, rent out the building, and grow watermelons. I’ll bet you could grow one big enough and sweet enough to win a prize at the county fair.” When he brightened a bit, I teased, “You could travel, too—like up to Atlanta to visit the Bullocks. We don’t have to work until we die, Hubert, just because our parents did.”

He didn’t say he would retire, but he reached over and gave my hand a little pat.

We were having a good old time until I went and spoiled it. “What about after the meeting last night? Where were you then?”

He snickered. “Ask Joe Riddley.”

“He said some fellows took Burlin Bullock out, and the two of you tried to drink each other under the table.”

He slewed his eyes my way. “I could have beat him, too, but I decided to quit. Didn’t want to embarrass a guest.”

“That’s not the way I heard it. And it sounds to me like there’s some time unaccounted for between the time you dropped Burlin off to change clothes and the time you went back to pick him up. The reason I’m here right now—and Chief Muggins will have my hide if he finds out I came—is to warn you that he’s gonna want a pretty careful description of your actions during that period. If you can find any witnesses to where you were, line them up.”

“I was closing up the building. That takes a while.”

“Not half an hour. Where else did you go?”

I expected him to say he’d dropped by his house for something. Instead, he jumped to his feet, his eyes turned pink, and he lapsed into the countrified talk he grew up with—a sure sign he was getting his dander up. “I was takin’ care of bidness, that’s where I was. Nobody saw me, and I didn’t see them.” He stood up and shook his finger at me. “You’ve always been a meddler, MacLaren, and I’m sick and tired of it. You stick to your bidness, and I’ll stick to mine. Now, I’ve got to go pick up Miss Georgia. You can wheel your own meddling self home.”

“He wouldn’t kill anybody,” I assured myself as I rolled out onto the sidewalk and down to the corner, where the city fathers had finally obeyed the disabilities act and created an accessible curb.

“Not on purpose,” myself agreed.

But that said it all. What if Hubert had run into the vagrant and his temper got out of hand? I hadn’t thought to ask Chief Muggins if the woman had been killed under the tank or somewhere else and brought there.

Something else bothered me. Hubert wasn’t usually much of a drinker. Why had he drunk so much last night?

I could think of only one way to distract Chief Muggins from Hubert.

I called him as soon as I got back to the office. “I’ve remembered something that might be of use to your investigation. That vagrant had been stalking Lance Bullock—or at least following his campaign. Maybe somebody at one of the places where Lance has spoken recently will know who she was.”

I thought of the call as a diversion tactic.

It turned out to be a bomb.

14

Have I failed to tell you that Chief Charlie Muggins thrives on publicity? Normally, his scope is limited to the
Statesman,
but he never resists a chance to branch out.

As soon as he hung up from my call, he went in search of the reporters who’d been hanging around the Bullocks. At Hardee’s, he ran into a tenacious young newspaperwoman with a reputation for digging dirt from under any rock. He told her that the dead woman had been stalking the Bullocks and asked if she’d noticed the woman in the crowds. She asked, “Have you checked her fingerprints in the system?”

He hadn’t, of course. Chief Muggins didn’t consider a homeless person worth bothering about. But she told him, “You do that and I’ll call some of my contacts around the state. This may be very important.” Between them, she and Charlie would eventually create an uproar.

I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course.

When Joe Riddley picked me up at noon to take me home for dinner, thunder was rumbling in the distance and I was plumb worn out. I told him as we drove home, “I think I’ll stay home and rest this afternoon. I’m even going to call Phyllis and cancel my appointment. It’s been a hard day, between finding the body, finding Tad—”

He slammed on the brakes so hard it’s a wonder my air bag didn’t pop out and smother me. “You found Tad? Why the Sam Hill didn’t you let me know?”

“I guess I forgot.” I filled him in on Martha’s and my discovery and Charlie’s absurd overreaction without wasting time explaining why Martha and I went to the barn in the first place. I finished, “Then Martha and I had to call Walker and Cindy, then I went to talk to Hubert—”

“Dangnabit, Little Bit, you leave Hubert to Charlie. I’ve told you and told you, I don’t want you meddling in stuff like this. Where is the boy?”

“Down at the juvenile detention center, thanks to Chief Muggins. But Hubert says he’s not pressing charges.”

“Tad ought to have somebody with him. I’m gonna leave you at the door and run down there. I’ll pick up a bite on my way back to work.”

Clarinda and I discovered that the wheelchair wouldn’t maneuver in our house without serious rearrangement of furniture, so I was back to crutches and hopping on one foot. My left leg got so trembly that she called Martha and told her, “Bring that walker Joe Riddley used while he was learning to walk again. We got another patient here who needs it.” Martha had a meeting at church that afternoon, but said she’d run it down later.

Before Clarinda left at two, she turned back at the door to say, “You get you a good nap so we can start in on those guest room boxes tomorrow.”

I stretched out on our bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The thunder boomed closer and closer, like the approach of doom. When I closed my eyes, I saw that poor woman under the water tank; then I saw Hubert in his store, red and furious. Where could he have been that he didn’t want to talk about? Had he started having those bathroom accidents that happen to some older men and needed to change his clothes? Had he needed to take medication and forgotten to bring it to dinner? Hubert always acted like taking medicine was equivalent to wearing a pink tutu.

I wondered who the dead woman was and why she’d been following the Bullocks around. She looked too old to be a groupie, too unsettled to have a voting registration card. I got to thinking about how she had once been a cute little kid with dreams and hopes, and wondered how she had wandered so far from whatever she could have become. As I stared at the low ceiling over my bed, I began to see a whole parade of people who never developed their potential. Which of them might have found the cure for cancer or come up with a workable solution to the Middle East crisis, if they’d blossomed like they should have? And was it their own fault they didn’t, or something lacking in the rest of us?

A crash outside my window brought me bolt upright. I hadn’t lived through a bad storm in that house yet, and we had two tall pines in our backyard. Pines are real brittle. If one of those fell, it would take our bedroom with it.

I obviously wasn’t going to sleep. I might as well get up. To perk up my spirits, I combed my hair and put on a muumuu Walker and Cindy brought me from Hawaii—a flowing, flamboyant floor-length garment bright with tropical flowers and butterflies. They’d even brought gold slippers to go with it. I slid on the left one and hopped into the hall to admire myself in the full-length mirror Joe Riddley had attached to the linen closet door. “You look like a Hawaiian queen,” I told my reflection.

Make that a hopping queen. I barely made it to the living room couch before I collapsed. I sure would have respect for anybody I saw on crutches after this.

Oddly enough, once I lay down on the couch, I got drowsy. The sky was so dark it felt like early evening. The thunder now sounded like a friendly rumble. It surrounded the dim room like a cocoon. I closed the blinds over the couch. Then, wrapped in the afghan Mama made her last year on this earth, I fell fast asleep.

The doorbell woke me. Only half-awake, I yelled, “I can’t get to the door. Come on in.” We don’t lock doors in the daytime.

I should have. I looked over my shoulder to see Burlin, holding a bouquet of autumn flowers in a yellow vase. Lightning backlit him in the open doorway. “You ought to lock that door. For all you knew, I could have been the Hopemore killer. And why are you in the dark?”

I yawned and blinked, trying to waken, then pushed myself upright. “You caught me dozing.” I checked my watch. It was after three, so I’d slept an hour. I sure was glad I had on more than my bathrobe, and hoped my hair wasn’t a mess. I refused to let my hands check, though. Who was I trying to impress?

“I came to bring you these.” He carried the flowers over to the dining room table. “There. Is that okay?” He turned on the dining room light so I could see them.

“They’re beautiful, but I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“I didn’t. They’re from Georgia and Abigail.” He straightened the vase a little, and I recalled that he liked things neat and tidy. He said, “Hubert Spence told us about the murder down in Wrens at a lunch meeting, but he didn’t say it was you who found the body. We heard that after we got back from Dublin, and Georgia said, ‘That poor thing. Go order her some flowers, Burlin, from all of us.’ I’m just the delivery boy.”

“The florist delivers,” I pointed out.

He bit one thumb and grinned like a little boy. “I know. I asked if I could bring them. I took them by your office, but they said you were at home, so I hurried over to beat the storm.” He paused, then added, “That’s a real fetching caftan.”

I was disgusted to find myself flushing.
It’s not your ankle that’s out of whack,
I told myself sharply,
it’s your head.

I must have frowned, because Burlin looked down at me in concern. “Are you doing all right? It must have been real traumatic, finding him.”

Either Charlie wasn’t releasing the news that the victim was a woman, or the Bullocks had limited access to the Hopemore grapevine.

“It was pretty traumatic, but that’s not why I’m home.” I lifted my hem enough to show off my cast. “I sprained my ankle.”

His eyebrows came together in concern. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when the pain pills wear off or I try to walk. I’m not real graceful on crutches. I thought you could be my son or daughter-in-law, bringing me a walker.”

“That would have been more practical than flowers.” He looked around. “Isn’t anybody here to help you?”

“No, the cook leaves at two.” All of a sudden the house felt very empty.

He must have felt it, too, because he headed for the door. “I just wanted to bring the flowers.” He opened the door.

A tremendous flash lit the room. Thunder boomed. The skies opened and rain streamed down. Burlin peered out. “Looks like the good Lord’s tipped over his rain barrel.”

I resigned myself to the inevitable. “You may as well stay awhile. There’s no need to get soaked.”

He shut the door so promptly, I had a suspicion he’d timed his arrival to coincide with the downpour. “Put your feet up again. I’ll sit here.” He moved a chair so I could look at him without turning my head. Then he switched on a lamp, turned off the dining room light, took his seat, stretched his feet out in front of him and folded his arms like he was planting himself permanently.

“It sure is peaceful in here,” he said when I hadn’t said anything else. “Between the murder and the coming storm, everybody over at our place has gone nuts. Binky and Georgia had some kind of tiff, and Binky went to bed with a migraine. Georgia is like a self-rewinding tape”—he changed his voice to sound like a mechanical female, uttering one syllable at a time with no inflection whatsoever—“We ought not to stay here. It’s not good for Lance’s campaign to be in the middle of a murder investigation. We ought to move on. We ought not to stay here.”

He was so funny, I chuckled in spite of myself. He joined me, then said, “She never says that when we’re campaigning in Atlanta—” He stopped, leaving the sentence open.

“—where there’s always a murder investigation going on.” I wished I hadn’t done that. Pausing to let me finish his sentences was a game he’d liked to play when we were dating.

“We’re still on the same wavelength. I thought so,” he said with satisfaction.

“Not often,” I told him. “Where are Lance and Renée?”

“Lance is broody as a hen. I can’t get two words out of him. And Renée—I think the woman has sleeping sickness. She naps every chance she gets.”

“What about Edward?”

He grimaced. “One can get too much of Edward.”

“You could always go talk to the buffalo.”

“Not today. He’s been impounded until Lance’s lawyer and the driver of that Toyota come to some agreement.” He gave me a slight frown—I suppose to show I was supposed to do something about that. When I ignored it, he sighed. “I tell you, on days like this, I could give up politics. Lance is supposed to speak at a barbeque tonight in a park, but with all this rain, there won’t be anybody there, and we’ll all be huddled under a tree. I sure wish I had a cozy home—”

He saw the expression on my face and changed direction. “So how can I cheer you up? Want me to sing? Dance?” He held up both hands and shuffled his feet, then suggested, “Or shall I just sit here and keep you company, in case you want something?”

He sounded lonesome. And it wasn’t his fault I’d been in love with Joe Riddley when we met. I could at least be nice to him while we sat out the storm. “Fix us both a glass of tea. There’s some in the refrigerator. I’d get it, but I can’t carry anything with these danged crutches.”

Only when he rose and headed to obey did I remember that I was ordering around a former congressman. Oh, well, it was probably good for his soul.

“Where are the glasses?” he called from the kitchen.

“Your guess is as good as mine. We’ve lived here just a few weeks, and our cook is still letting things settle in where they feel at home.”