Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?: A Thoroughly Southern Mystery (26 page)

That was a bit much from somebody who thought black and gray were the only colors on the color wheel.

Contrary to what Olive later claimed, I did not snatch that dress from her. I did take it firmly and hang it back in the closet. “Edie wouldn’t want us wasting a good dress to bury her in. I’ll talk to Genna about what to do with the rest of these clothes.”

“She’ll probably put them in a garage sale with the rest of the stuff in the house.” Olive moved restlessly around the room and stopped to rummage in Edie’s jewelry box with an appraising eye. Only Mama’s good training and my respect for the office of judge kept me from stomping over there to give her a good smack. She picked up a small figurine from the dresser and examined its bottom. “Pity she chipped this. It may be prewar Dresden. But look at all the Hummels on her chest.” She headed in that direction and began to lift them to examine their bottoms. “These are old enough to be worth a little.” She started setting them on a nearby table.

“They were Edie’s mother’s,” I said, less than charitably. “Genna may get them and the rest of the stuff in the house”—I emphasized the words she had used—“but she’ll have to wait until Josiah dies. They’re still his—along with the house and the grove. And Genna may not get them when he’s gone.”

I had her attention now. “What do you mean?”

I wished I hadn’t let my temper run away with my tongue. “Oh, just that there may be other relatives, that’s all. Edie didn’t have any money, either—you need to tell that to Genna. Her daddy lost every cent he had, and was deep in debt when he died. Edie paid every cent she got to his debtors.”

She stared. “How do you know?”

“Never mind how I know. It’s the truth.” I gathered up the suit and blouse and headed for the chest. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find some underwear.” Mama always said, “Honey, don’t you neglect to put underwear on me for my funeral. If they ever have to dig me up, I don’t want them thinking I wasn’t respectable.”

I thought Edie would want to be respectable, too.

In the mirror, I saw Olive watching me as I opened dresser drawers. I looked away. When I looked back in a few seconds, I watched her put her hand on the top of the chest and lift it up. There was a tray above the top drawer that I hadn’t suspected was there. I took out some panties. “Now let me find a slip,” I murmured, rummaging around while a slip lay there in plain view.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Olive in the mirror.

She took out a white case, opened it, and slid a strand of pearls into her pocket. A gold necklace followed, then I saw her lift a letter and examine it with a gloating smile.

“Well,” she said carelessly, turning away and sliding the letter into her pocket with the jewelry, “I guess I’ll be going if you don’t need any help.”

She ambled back toward the door and started slowly down the steps. I heard her pick up her pace after two or three steps.

I followed. “I’m all finished,” I explained as she turned to give me a surprised look at the bottom of the stairs.

“You don’t have panty hose.” She was moving toward the main staircase.

“She won’t need panty hose. Do you reckon Genna wants me to take this stuff straight to the funeral home?” I was crossing the upstairs hall right behind her.

“You might as well.”

She doubled her speed going down the main stairs and was almost running by the time she headed toward the kitchen. I waited until she was at the door, then called, “Stop her!” Joe Riddley could hold her better than I could.

Wouldn’t you know, that man wasn’t there? I arrived at the kitchen to find his newspaper lying folded on the table beside my pocketbook. The screened door of the porch slammed behind Olive.

“Stop, thief!” I dumped Edie’s clothes in an unceremonious heap beside my pocketbook and hared after her.

When I reached the back steps, Olive was heading to her car. “Stop, thief!” I yelled again.

She fumbled frantically for her keys, then threw the purse hard at me. Long legs churning, she ran across the drive and down into the grove.

There was no way I could catch her on foot. We’d come in Joe Riddley’s car, and I didn’t have its keys. But a green tractor stood outside the equipment shed by the gas pumps.

I used to love to drive my daddy’s tractor as a girl. I’d even driven Ridd’s tractors off and on in recent years, for the fun of it.

I swung myself up into the cab and saw the keys in the ignition. With a prayer of thanks, I started the engine. Somebody had just filled the tank with gas, and it moved like a charm. I headed through the grove after Olive as fast as that thing could chug.

If she hadn’t paused to catch her breath, I might not have caught up with her, but there she suddenly was, three trees ahead of me, clinging to the trunk, gasping. When she saw it was me on the tractor, she took a deep breath and darted around the tree and down the next row.

I followed.

She ran around another tree and headed back the way she had come.

I followed. The tractor wasn’t as lithe as Olive, of course, but I could keep her in view.

Pecans crunched under my tires and flew every which way. The medians were mowed, but Henry’s crew hadn’t harvested this area yet. Down one row at the far end of the grove, I saw the shaker making its funny progress in our direction. I hoped Josiah and Henry would forgive me for the nuts I was destroying in the process of trying to save Edie’s pearls.

I also wondered what the men operating the shaker must think of the crazy tractor dashing between trees and up and down rows.

Olive and I both knew she couldn’t hide from me, no matter how many trees she darted around or how many rows she tried. The only thing bothering me was what I’d do with her when I caught her. Where the dickens was Joe Riddley? Some bodyguard he had turned out to be. What if Olive had come upstairs to murder me, instead of to steal what little Edie had left?

I wondered how she had known about that secret tray in the chest. Genna must have told her. The bedroom furniture had been Wick’s wedding gift to Edie, and I’m sure he showed off that nifty feature to both his wife and his daughter.

Which brought up a disturbing likelihood: that Olive had killed Edie for the snuffboxes, jewelry, and silver, with jealousy fueling her fire, and this morning had come back for things she’d missed the first time. I’d bet my final dollar Genna hadn’t told her about that tray until after Edie died. I’d have to tell Sheriff Gibbons about it, and about the keys in the pantry. His men hadn’t been as thorough as he expected them to be.

In that second while I wasn’t paying close attention, Olive pivoted and made a daring lunge past me, heading back down the grove away from the house. I had to stop and turn. By then she had vanished.

Five trees ahead of me, the shaker and a huge tree were dancing their jig to the accompaniment of a storm of nuts. It takes a shaker two minutes to shake a tree and move to the next one. As they finished the fifth tree and came toward the fourth, I caught an agitated flash of black among the leaves of the third.

“Stop!” I shouted. They couldn’t hear me above the roar of my machine and theirs. “Stop!”

I revved that engine and rolled down the row as fast I could go, straight for the shaker.

To this day I wonder what those men thought when they saw a tractor barreling straight for them, driven by a small woman with a beauty parlor hairdo. None of them spoke enough English to tell me. But at least they stopped. They watched warily as I hiked up my skirt and climbed down.

I also wonder whether I’d have done better to have let them shake Olive out of that tree. Instead, I cocked my head and called up to her, “You might as well come on down. I know you’re there, and I saw you take the pearls and Edie’s gold chain.”

The men broke into frantic chatter and shook almost as much as their machine when Olive appeared among the branches. For once she looked like a real French waif. Her cheeks and hands were smudged with dirt, and she had leaves in her wind-ruffled hair. As she sat on the bottom branch and accepted their help getting down, I saw a flash of white cotton through a rip in her slacks. So much for red bikini underpants.

Once on the ground, she glared. “Now I suppose you’ll want to call the police?”

“Oh, no,” I assured her. “We’re outside the city limits. I’m going to call the sheriff.”

My cell phone was in my pocketbook at the house, and I couldn’t ask the men to hold Olive until I fetched it, so I cupped my hands and called, “Joe Riddley? Joe Riddley!” in the voice that used to bring our boys to dinner from our neighbor’s cattle pond two fields away.

The men immediately cupped their hands and began to call, “Joe Reedley. Joe Reedley.”

“
Mi esposo,
” I explained, drawing on my small store of Spanish. “
A la casa.
”

For all I knew, I was saying I liked my husband on top of a house, like pie à la mode, but one of them grinned and nodded. “
Sí.
” He started out for the house at a run. The others watched Olive so carefully she didn’t dare run. They obviously thought we were the day’s entertainment.

Joe Riddley arrived in the backyard the same time the worker did. I saw them jump into his Town Car and head down under the trees. Joe Riddley got out of one side and the Mexican worker climbed out of the other, pausing to stroke the silver finish with his hand. “What’s this fellow saying about you bein’ up a tree?” Joe Riddley demanded.

“It was Olive.” I’m too polite to point, but I nodded in her direction. “Call the sheriff. She stole Edie’s pearls. She may have killed her, too.”

The men understood enough of what I said to take a few steps back in a circle of wonder.

The sheriff came himself. He listened to my story and put Olive in his cruiser. She never said a word except “I want to call my lawyer.” She glared at me whenever she looked my way, but as she was climbing into the backseat of the sheriff’s cruiser and thought I couldn’t see her, she had a funny expression on her face. I would have sworn it was a smirk.

“Where the dickens did you get to when I needed you?” I demanded when Joe Riddley and I were alone.

He looked sheepish. “I’d been wanting to get a good look at Josiah’s new sorting equipment. I thought I’d just nip out there and take a gander while you were upstairs.”

I was about to tell him what I thought about his future as a bodyguard, but a reporter and photographer from the
Hopemore Statesman
showed up right then. After the reporter interviewed me, that pesky photographer insisted on taking a shot of me beside the tractor. My picture would appear on the second page the following Wednesday, under the headline “A Judge of Many Talents.”

I’d always thought of driving as a skill, myself.

When Joe Riddley and I took Edie’s burial clothes by the funeral home, the woman at the front desk wanted to discuss all of Edie’s wonderful accomplishments and wonder how Hopemore was going to get along without her. Since I was wondering the same thing, that conversation took longer than Joe Riddley thought it needed to.

We barely made it to a business association luncheon that I’d have skipped if I hadn’t been president of the group that year.

After lunch I returned a call from Alex. “The sheriff’s office called me with some message about why Olive isn’t coming in,” she told me, “but they mentioned your name, so I thought I’d get the story from the horse’s mouth.”

“This is one weary horse. But here’s what happened.” I didn’t tell her about the chase in the pecan grove—I figured both Olive and I deserved to hang on to a little dignity as long as we could—but I told her I’d seen Olive taking some things from Edie’s room and turned her over to the sheriff. I finished up, “You don’t reckon Olive could have killed Edie, do you? I mean, I know they were both librarians, so you might find it hard to believe—”

She snorted. “You don’t know librarians like I do. But I am surprised Olive would steal the stuff with you right there. She’s generally real meticulous in her work. I don’t know if she killed Edie—and I hope not, because I don’t need to lose another staff member right now—but I do think she put those keys in Edie’s pocketbook. A woman came by today saying she’d lost her keys a couple of weeks ago, on a day when she, her daughter, and her grandson went to Augusta to shop. She’d thought she must have left them somewhere up there, but she said that last night she asked God to help her find them, and this morning, just as she was waking up, she pictured them, clear as anything, on the floor of our ladies’ room. Can you believe she thinks God bothers with something as trivial as lost keys?”

Having been granted answers to a few trivial prayers myself, I murmured, “Well, there is a verse in James that says, ‘You have not because you ask not.’ ”

“Maybe so.” Alex sounded dubious. “But I’d be embarrassed to pray for anything so dumb. Anyway, after she woke up, she remembered that while her daughter returned books on their way to Augusta, she took her grandson to the bathroom and he got to playing in her purse. She wondered if he’d dropped her keys and she’d not noticed.”

I knew Alex was thinking the same thing I was: Olive could have found them and put them in Edie’s purse. But why?

I couldn’t think of a single reason, but what I wanted to know right then was, “Did you ask that woman why somebody with a grandson—especially somebody who prays for help with lost keys—has a brass tag from a porno Web site on her key chain?”

Alex’s laugh rumbled across the wire. “Not me, girlfriend. She’s a library patron. But you want her number? Call and ask her yourself—and let me know.” She sighed. “You can also come over here and work my front desk. I’m as shorthanded as a one-armed short-order cook.”

I declined both offers, pleading that I was seriously behind in my work.

All that time Joe Riddley had sat at his desk reading spring seed catalogues like they were candidates for the
New York Times
best-seller lists. “Go on down to the Christmas tree lot,” I told him crossly. “I can’t work with you rustling those pages.”