Doing It at the Dixie Dew (12 page)

I counted out three lemons and put them in a bag. “What did the housekeeper take?”

“Everything, honey, everything,” Verna said. “Every dish, spoon, speck of lint. I guess they left the light coming in the windows, but that was all.” She laughed. “Lord, that took gall or guts or both. They just cleaned out the rectory … couch, chairs, tables, beds, rugs, lamps … they took everything but the curtains and shades.” Verna squeezed a tomato. “I guess that's one way to get your house cleaned, but I can do without it just the same.”

I remembered the moving van at midnight. “What would make anyone do a thing like that?” I wondered aloud. I moved my cart to the celery and carrots tucked in their shining plastic bags and separated by nosegays of curly parsley. Mama Alice always believed parsley set off anything you served, whether it was sandwiches, soup or just eggs and toast. And she grew her own, year-round. There was a sunny spot by the kitchen door that had been her parsley bed for years. I used it for greenery with the fresh flowers I put in every guest room.

“Who knows why anyone does anything anymore?” Verna answered, pushing her cart toward the cheese and dairy.

Miss Tempie, in a green organza dress, wheeled past. Half of the handkerchief hem swept the floor behind her like a train. She wore a matching hat that had been shoved too close to the side of the hatbox during storage. The rim of it tilted up on one side and the giant pink silk poppies spilled down the other. Miss Tempie had her nose in the air as if she smelled something unpleasant and was trying to get out of its range. In her cart she had two cans of cat food, a head of lettuce and two blank cans missing their labels and bent in the middle. I thought about Scott saying half the little old ladies in Littleboro lived on cat food and socked away their savings or dropped them heavily in the various collection plates around town. Unless Miss Tempie had taken in a stray cat lately, she was one of them. Eccentric, I thought. Probably counts every penny, sits down every month and balances her checkbook to the last cent, then she never knows how much she's got in stocks, bonds, trusts, real estate … whatever. Who knows how much she's worth? Her family had owned half the town at one time, the Lovingoods the other half.

“Hell to pay,” Miss Tempie said as she wheeled past. “Everything has to be accounted for.”

I thought she looked paler than usual, her eyes as dark and angry looking as two burnt cookies.

Verna pulled herself up small and close to the side of the dairy case. She wrapped her arms about herself and tried to look blank. I thought I heard her let out a breath of relief when Miss Tempie passed without seeing her. What was Verna afraid of?

“It's not that cold in here,” I said. “Even with the air-conditioning.”

Verna shook, briskly rubbed her shoulders. “I just never get used to it … air-conditioning.” She looked at the ceiling. “I must be standing under a duct.” She glanced behind me. “Lord, there's Reba. Let me get to the other side of the store before she sees me or she'll end up following me home.”

“Got my medicine,” Reba sang as she swept past. “Best medicine in the world.” She held a bottle of grape juice tight to her chest. Reba wore jeans, a black T-shirt that said: “We're the Monkees” on it and some sort of cape that had once been part of an orange blanket, a wild orange, as if it had been dyed with full-strength tangerine Kool-Aid. Reba trailed the blanket, whose back edge had raveled to a fringe. She click-clacked her rubber flip-flops like a child smacking bubble gum. “Gotta move this train along.” She swung her cape around.

She's out of it, I thought. Poor Reba. One eye looked toward the ceiling. The other one studied the produce counter. Did she see anything at all? Reba shook her hair, which had leaves and twigs entwined in it, and I saw that she wore the longest, tackiest earrings ever molded and glued. They were tarnished black and had green plastic “stones” big as half dollars. Reba jiggled her feet as she stood in line. “At the junction, Petticoat, that is.” She whoot, whooted like a train.

She's been watching reruns on TV, I thought. She can probably sing every theme song from every sitcom that's been on television for the last twenty years, including, apparently,
Petticoat Junction
and “Hey, hey, we're the Monkees.”

Verna put a loaf of bread and English muffins into her cart and headed for the checkout. In line she picked up a tabloid. “Queen Sees Elvis in Her Private Pantry,” read one headline. “Twelve-year-old Gives Birth to Three-Headed Dog,” read another.

Outside, I looked for Verna to see if she needed a ride home. Miss Tempie seemed to be long gone. Reba sat on the curb in front of the store, playing with her toes and drinking grape juice from the bottle. She seemed happily absorbed.

“Eeenie, meenie, miney, moe,” Reba sang. “Out you go, you little piggy, you.”

She didn't see me as I got in the car, and I felt I had managed to escape something, I didn't know quite what. Driving home I noticed an annual spring sale sign in the Calico Cottage window. Herb Philpot's Exxon had red flags flapping and Clyde Edgemont of Clyde's Used Cars propped one leg against the side of a gleaming black Buick. I knew he told customers this was the finest car ever to cruise a road and no sirree, it didn't use a drop of oil. Not the first drop he knowed of.

I parked around back. Scott had screens off the windows, a ladder to the roof and the hose in his hand. He had washed the windows and screens. Scott was spring cleaning from the top down. Maybe my Lady Bug would get a scrubbing, too. But that was something I could do myself. I always had.

I lugged the bag of groceries up the back steps to the screened porch. These weren't steep steps compared to the concrete ones in the basement. Still I felt slightly breathless when I reached the top. All my life I'd been cautioned about these steps and the basement ones. I'd never fallen … nor had anyone until Mama Alice. I tried to imagine Mama Alice in a heap at the bottom of the stairs and felt a chill like Verna had in the grocery store. How long had Mama Alice lain there cold and in the darkness before she'd been found?

The furnace man had found her. He'd come to check the furnace. Mama Alice never locked the back door and he'd used it all his life, like the plumber or anyone else who needed to. He had gone next door to get Verna and Verna called me in Maine. I had taken the first flight and thanked my lucky stars that my grandmother had been found not too long after her fall. Mama Alice had lived longer than she'd wanted to. I was sure of that. Something told me. She was locked in that body that took its time dying.

I spent those months holding my grandmother's hand, putting cracked ice on her lips, talking to her, reading aloud, pretending any moment she'd wake as though she'd been asleep. Maybe Mama Alice didn't know if I was in Littleboro or New England, but I knew. There were nurses to do what nurses do best, but I was there. Mama Alice was clean, comfortable, cared for. She was in no pain, only a place between living and dying, a place that was no place at all.

I shelved the rest of the groceries, put the milk, apples, butter and odds and ends in the refrigerator.

Scott yelled for me to raise a bedroom window and unlatch a screen. He stood outside on the ladder. I told him about Father Roderick's housekeeper and the whole house theft.

“Maybe she didn't get her wages,” Scott said. “Decided to take it out in furniture.”

“White-collar crime?”

“Black turtleneck,” he said. “How'd they discover when it happened?”

“Verna said one of the church members called and couldn't get anyone on the phone, so she walked over to see what was going on. That's when they saw the place was completely empty.”

“What was going on had gone, huh?” asked Scott.

When I'd seen the moving van tearing down Main Street I should have called someone. Neighborhood Watch didn't work if neighbors only watched and didn't do anything. I'd thought it an odd hour for a U-Rental truck to be hauling ass through town and that the frantic driver had looked familiar.

“Where was Miss Tempie?” Scott asked.

“She doesn't work on Mondays.” Miss Tempie wasn't beyond suspicion in my book of doing anything or arranging to have it done. But maybe I was just remembering those piano lessons with the alcohol and ruler. They had left their mark on me. Permanently.

Scott carried the screen down the ladder. “This is the last one. I'll leave it with the others to dry. Gotta go pick up something at the warehouse. Be back in about an hour.”

I waved, said, “See you,” and headed upstairs.

In the upstairs bath I checked the tub for cleanser scum. I always felt like Mama Alice running my fingers over things, checking for little details. Sure enough, I picked up white dust. I got a cloth and polished the sink and tub. I didn't like to take a bath with cleanser scum and I didn't think guests would either. Guests. I hadn't had any this week. Had word gotten around in the trade? Was Ossie DelGardo whispering through some underground that mysterious things were happening around the Dixie Dew and attempts had been made against me? Be paranoid, will you? I looked in the mirror. I had dark smudges under each eye as if wild mushrooms had sprouted there overnight. My hair needed a trim and a shampoo. Most of all, my face needed a smile. I pushed up the corners of my mouth. Fake it, kid, I told the girl in the mirror. You're here. It's got to be a whole lot better than where you were about to spend last night, not to mention the rest of eternity.

Then I heard a light tap, tap, tapping on the window.

“Scott?” I raised the window. “Scott?” I called. I looked down. Even the ladder was long gone and the air thoroughly empty.

Was I hearing things now? Had Crazy Reba followed Scott up the ladder to look in my bedroom window? Then moved it? Whoever it was had to be bold to do it in broad daylight unless it was someone we all knew who could go about and never be suspected. You can live in a small town most of your life, know everybody and who they're married to or related to, and then something happens and you find out you really didn't know some people at all.

Chapter Thirteen

When I reached the backyard there was no one to be seen. As I rounded the corner toward the front of the house I saw something gleaming under the shrubs. Sherman pawed it. He was always chasing lizards. “Stop it,” I yelled at him. “Bad, Sherman, bad.” I picked up the cat, but the black-green shiny object didn't scoot away. “Run for your life, lizard,” I said while Sherman squirmed mightily under my arm. I touched the lizard with my foot and still it didn't move. I sent Sherman around the corner and bent to pick it up. Not a lizard at all, but part of an old earring, blackened silver with a slender green stone. The earring felt heavy in my hand and looked very expensive, maybe even real? I tried to polish it against my shirt but couldn't tell any difference. Though it was too heavy to be plastic, the earring still looked like something Crazy Reba would hang on herself. A real bauble. I patted Sherman, who now rolled over on his back and waited to get his stomach rubbed. “You're innocent. And I'm sorry I ever thought you weren't. Go sun yourself. Go in peace.” I could swear the cat smiled. “Sweet idiot.”

I held the earring up to the sun as Scott came up from his errand. “You sun gazing?”

“Look at this.” I handed him the broken earring.

“Where'd it come from?” He studied the back of it.

“Sherman had it.”

“Sherman?”

“He must have found it in the grass. I thought he had a lizard and took it away. Think it's real?”

“It looks really real to me,” Scott said.

“Looks like Crazy Reba to me, but where would she get it?”

“Who knows? The latest yard sale? Flea market? The dump? She forages twenty-four hours a day … wide and deep … all hours of every night, days and weekends.”

“I wonder what all she sees?” Scott asked. “What she knows? Maybe she knows who killed Miss Lavinia. Father Roderick? But who'd believe her if she did?”

I remembered Reba the day I'd bought her fried chicken, singing, “Jesus give me this necklace.” What had all that been about? Was this earring part of it? Maybe Reba had a key to some of this stuff going on … if it wasn't Reba herself. But I couldn't imagine Reba poisoning Miss Lavinia. Father Roderick? I didn't know. Reba had such strong hands and her mind was so strange.

A blue sedan cruised by, turned when it passed Verna's and came back. This time it pulled in the drive and a woman in white slacks opened the car door and yelled behind her cupped hand, “You got any rooms left?”

“Yes.” I motioned her in. “We've got parking in the back.”

The woman hopped out, pulling on a black sweatshirt that read on the chest: “God, I'm good.” “We're half-lost,” she said. “And I told Leon if he went a mile further, I'd faint on him. I'm that fatigued. There's tomorrow, I said, but Leon could drive straight into it. Some men think they've got to drive the wheels off a car the first day.” She flung a huge straw purse over her shoulder and pulled on pink plastic sandals. “Shirley Putterman,” she said. “And I'm pleased to be here. I could kiss this ground I'm so tired of that car.”

I led her toward the hall registration desk. The woman hollered around the porch as Leon drove in the back. “Bring that little bag, too,” she called. “I need…”

I didn't hear the last part. “Room with a private bath or shared?” I asked. “We have no other guests at the moment, so the shared bath would be private unless someone else comes.”

“We'll take a chance,” the woman said, and signed the registration. “Life's a chance anyway, I've always said, and I'll even shower with somebody if I have to. Naked is a state of mind. That's how God made us and I've never been ashamed of it.” She looked around the room. “Honey, this is the cutest house. Can I poke around a little?”