The Three Miss Margarets

by Louise Shaffer

  “Which one of the boys in blue do you know?” Josh murmured in her ear.

  “All of them.”

  “Who’s most likely to talk to you?”

  “Mike Murray’s got the loose lips.”

  “Wait till they break up, then grab him fast.”

  As if on cue, the little group dispersed and Laurel moved quickly to Mike, reaching him just as he was about to get into his car. Josh did his best to melt invisibly behind her.

  “Hey Mike,” she said. He eyed her warily. “What’s going on?”

  “Now, Laurel, you know I can’t talk to you.”

  “Off the record.” She held up her hands. “See? No notes, no tape recorder.” She could feel the look of surprise she was getting from Josh. “Come on, Mike,” she said. “You know whatever it is will be all over town by noon. I could hear the ruckus you boys are making all the way to my house.”

  “All I can tell you is we just found Vashti Johnson in her grandma’s cabin.”

  Behind her she heard Josh’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Vashti?” she asked. “What’s she doing there?”

  “She wasn’t doing anything. Not anymore. We found her body. The boys’re taking her off to the coroner’s office.”

  She thought she’d heard it wrong.

  Josh said, “Oh, my God!” in a stunned voice.

  “Vashti’s dead?” she repeated stupidly. “Vashti Johnson? I didn’t even know she was home.”

  “No one did,” said Mike.

  It was unthinkable. Vashti, daughter of the archenemy Nella, was dead.

  “How?” Josh demanded. “What happened?”

  Which of course made Mike clam up instantly. Then Ed appeared.

  “Morning, Laurel,” he said, smiling pleasantly, but his eyes narrowed when he saw who was standing behind her. Clearly he remembered Josh from the bar. Or maybe the rumors of her exploits had already started traveling.

  Ed dismissed Mike, who got dutifully into his car and roared off. She knew Josh was wanting to ask a million questions, but he wasn’t going to risk it. She gave Ed her best pretty-girl smile.

  “What’s going on, Ed?”

  “Sorry if we woke you,” he said, and turned away, blowing her off the way he used to when he was canceling a date and not about to give her an explanation. She did a little dance step that put her directly in his path and stopped him. “You found Vashti Johnson dead in the cabin?”

  Ed’s face flushed. Mike would get the riot act read to him later.

  “Is that true?” she urged.

  “You know I’m not gonna talk about this now. Tell Hank to come over to the station in a couple of hours and I’ll have some information for him.” Hank was her boss at the Gazette, and they both knew he would see to it that he wrote this one.

  “Who found her? How’d you know to go to the cabin?” she asked.

  “I told you, Laurel, not now.” He started to turn again, but she did another dance step.

  “Thing is, we might be able to help,” she said, turning back to include Josh. Ed shot him a quick look of dislike. Ed might not want her himself but he sure as hell didn’t want anyone else to have her.

  “We got in very late last night,” she went on. “We might have seen something.”

  “Who’s he?” Ed growled, indicating Josh without making eye contact.

  “A friend—from New York.” She gave it a second to sink in. “Anyhow, last night—actually, it was this morning—we were at the cabin. We were on the way to my house, but we took a wrong turn.” That would clinch it, just in case his imagination wasn’t fleshing out the details. “I don’t know what time it was, but it must have been after two o’clock.”

  “You saw something?” Ed demanded.

  “Someone was there. Inside the cabin.”

  “Vashti.” He didn’t add obviously, but she could feel it hanging in the air. “You were probably the last one to see her alive.”

  “No, it was someone else.” She could hear Josh clearing his throat behind her, warning her to keep her mouth shut. But she knew Ed better than he did. “The Miss Margarets were there, all three of them.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” Ed said. “Dr. Maggie phoned in the report this morning. She saw lights on and was afraid someone broke in. She asked us to check.” As soon as he said it, he realized he had slipped. “But I don’t want to see that in the Gazette. You tell Hank.”

  “Sure.” She turned to Josh. “Let’s go.”

  She started off, but Ed called out, “Wait!” She’d never noticed how really slow he could be when you got him rattled. She turned.

  “You sure you saw the three Miss Margarets?”

  Josh stepped in. “Actually, we were kind of drunk, officer.”

  “Sheriff,” Ed corrected. “You saw them at the cabin around two A.M., Laurel Selene?”

  She couldn’t resist it. “Yes. Of course, we were a little preoccupied.”

  Ed turned a satisfactory shade of brick red under his tan. “I’ll talk to you later, Laurel,” he said pointedly, and he turned on his heel and walked away.

  Josh said, “Let’s get out of here, now that you’ve blown it.”

  “I blew it? I just found out who called in the report.”

  “You gave away something more valuable.” He strode back to his car and got in, leaving her to climb up into the big stupid thing on her own. “We had information no one else does. You don’t give up an edge like that.”

  “I got information for that information.”

  “Bull. You just wanted to send your boyfriend Billy Joe Bob on a testosterone high.” He drove back across the highway and started down the dirt road to her driveway, going fast.

  “His name is Ed, and he is not my boyfriend.”

  “If he’s not, then worry about being stalked. If that guy got any more territorial he was going to start pissing a circle around you.”

  “Look, I was going to have to tell the police or my boss what we saw.”

  “I assume ‘boss’ refers to the mysterious Hank. He’s your boss at what job?”

  “I work for the local newspaper. As a reporter.”

  “You didn’t think to mention that you’re a writer when I was giving you my résumé last night?”

  “While you were dropping names like Vanity Fair and People?”

  “I do not drop names.”

  “It’s a little tiny paper called the Charles Valley Gazette. And my job, when I’m not busy watering the plants, involves covering the bake sale at the First Baptist Church.” That seemed to appease him. He nodded and sped on in silence, hitting the hole in her road full force. Thank God the lids were still on the coffees.

  Finally they jerked to a stop in front of her place.

  “That was bracing,” she said.

  He wasn’t listening. “Jesus Christ, what happened to her?” he asked.

  “You mean Vashti?”

  He nodded. “If she was sick, I didn’t know it. But what else could it have been? Those three women were there. . . .”

  “Trust me, the three Miss Margarets didn’t kill her, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  “I don’t know what to think. Vashti Johnson’s dead.” He seemed genuinely dismayed.

  “Does this mean the end of your book?” she asked.

  “Hell, no. I want to tell it even more now.”

  He sat for a moment in silence. Then he turned to look at her, and there was something thoughtful in it. Like he was calculating something in his head. He kept looking at her until she was about to ask him what the hell was wrong. Then, suddenly, whatever he’d been debating seemed to have been resolved. He smiled at her.

  “We never drank our coffee,” he said. “How about it?”

  She’d probably be late for work if she said yes, but something was up with him and she wanted to know what it was.

  “Just a few minutes,” she said.

  “Great.” He got out and headed for the house. She grabbed the two
Styrofoam cups and followed him.

  He was in the middle of her living room looking at the shelves of books that covered one of her walls. He was back to calculating again. About what?

  “You read all these?” he asked.

  “Not the encyclopedia or the almanac.” She stuck his coffee in the microwave and turned on the timer, hoping as she always did that the chemicals in the Styrofoam wouldn’t somehow melt into the hot liquid.

  She moved to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room and watched him take down a frayed hardcover book with a disintegrating binding titled The Complete Shakespeare. He opened it. On the front page, right under the name of the professor who had written the foreword, the words Baby Merrick had been scrawled in pencil. The handwriting was large and round like a child’s. Beneath it, in ink, in a tidy prim hand was written Laurel Selene McCready, with Merrick added in parentheses. She watched him take down the rest of her hardcover books; three Reader’s Digest Best of the Year anthologies, a copy of Valley of the Dolls with the original jacket, and a volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. He checked the front pages.

  “The names are in all of them,” she said. “My father wrote the one in pencil before I was born. He didn’t know if I was gonna be a boy or a girl, so he put down baby. I wrote my name in ink when I was eight.” Josh put the book back on the shelf. He gave her a smile and another nod. She couldn’t lose the feeling that he was after something. The microwave dinged and she brought him his coffee.

  “Interesting collection you have here,” he said at last. “Lot of range.”

  “I didn’t pick them. My father left them to me.” He left the books and a whole lot of heartache, but Josh didn’t need to know that.

  “He was an eclectic reader.” He was eyeing the paperbacks now, taking in the jumble of titles, murder mysteries, thirty-year-old how-to manuals, romance novels, and dog-eared copies of the classics.

  “He never read them. He bought them at a garage sale for me when he heard my mother was pregnant. I guess he thought it would give me class.” She went into the kitchen to zap the second cup of coffee. He followed her.

  “Nice thing to do for your kid.”

  Nicer would have been if he hadn’t ruined her mother’s life. And hers. She shrugged.

  “You never knew your father?” Josh asked. But he was a little too casual about it. The microwave made its dinging sound. And suddenly, in the way that the brain puts things together when you’re not expecting it to, she got it. She’d been suspicious of him since the first moment he mentioned the three Miss Margarets, but she’d pushed the thoughts aside. Now she knew she’d been had.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  “What?”

  “You knew who I was, didn’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve been working on that damn story about Vashti forever. You’ve done your homework.”

  “Some,” he hedged, suddenly wary.

  “You know why Vashti and Nella left town.”

  “Yes. What does that have to—”

  “When you picked me up last night, you knew whose daughter I was.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Don’t lie!”

  “For Christ’s sake, how could I—”

  “My father is part of your story.”

  “How the hell would I know you were John Merrick’s daughter?”

  “So you do know about John Merrick!”

  “Yes. But I didn’t know he was your father last night when I came here with you. That’s the truth.”

  But it wasn’t the whole truth. There was something else . . . then she had it. She looked at the bookshelves. “This morning you weren’t planning on coming back, were you? You were just gonna take off. But then you went poking around my books and read my father’s name in the front.” He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. She remembered how happy—no, how flattered—she’d been that he’d come back with his goddamn coffee.

  “Okay, I did look at your books,” he said. “I look in people’s medicine cabinets too. I read the mail upside down on my doctor’s desk—”

  “Where did you go for coffee?”

  “A place called McGee’s.”

  “Did you ask Sammy McGee about me, or was his wife the one waiting tables?”

  “Look—”

  “Her name is Faith. She wears a red handkerchief fixed like a flower in her breast pocket.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Never mind. I’ll get it from her.”

  “I asked a couple of questions. It’s what I do. I ask questions.”

  “You were going to use me.” She wanted to kill him. She couldn’t believe she’d been such a fool.

  “And last night you were using me,” he said. “My guess would be to get back at Sheriff Billy Joe Bob—”

  “Don’t change the subject. You came back here to get the dirt on my father—”

  “I came back because I remembered you didn’t have a fucking car!” he shouted. He paused. “And because I wanted to ask you about your father.”

  “Thank you! Now get out.”

  “Look, I still have to drive you back to the bar.”

  “I’ll get there on my own.”

  “You’re a million miles from nowhere.”

  “I’ll manage.” She hadn’t a clue how. But the idea of a twenty-minute drive with him was impossible. She snatched up her purse and stalked out. He came racing after her and grabbed her arm.

  “Where are you going?”

  She tried to back away; he held her even tighter. “Leave me the fuck alone!” she shouted.

  They stood so close she could see the vein on the side of his temple beating. For a crazy minute she thought he might pull her down on the ground and start making love to her right there. Or she might pull him down. Or she might twist out of his grip and slap him hard. Or they might both laugh. They teetered on possibilities.

  Then he dropped her arm and said, “To hell with it. Walk to town, I don’t give a shit.” And he got into his SUV and took off so fast he literally left her standing in a cloud of red clay dust. Which was another one of those things she thought only happened in bad fiction.

  By the time she had walked halfway down the dirt road, Laurel was already regretting her grand gesture. It was a chilly morning, and she had the hike from hell ahead of her unless some kind soul picked her up. Which would be embarrassing, given the number of people who knew she’d left the Grill with the guy from New York. Furthermore, Hank would kill her if she was late for work again. Or, worse, fire her. Bad as her job was, she didn’t want to lose it. She tried to walk faster, but she’d forgotten to take her caffeine pills, so the headache that had been threatening all morning was beginning to kick in.

  When she got to the highway, all the cop cars had cleared away. Ed and his troops had moved operations elsewhere. Josh was probably trying to find them so he could get all the gory details for his story. Well, lots of luck on that.

  The highway traffic hadn’t started yet; it was too early. The good news was she wasn’t likely to run into anyone who knew her. The bad news was, she wasn’t likely to run into anyone who knew her and might offer her a lift. Damn Josh.

  She heard a horn. Surprised, she looked up. No one used their horns in Charles Valley except the tourists. Denny was approaching in his old green pickup. He waved, drove past her, made a U-turn, and pulled up alongside her.

  She climbed into the front seat gratefully. “Bless you. What are you doing out this way so early?”

  “I went over to the bar to get a delivery and saw your car in the lot. Figured your date, not being a well-brought-up son of the South, might have left you stranded this morning.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Chapter Seven

  LI’L BIT WALKED ONTO HER PORCH and looked out at the empty highway. She watched as Denny Larsen’s green pickup drove past her house, made a U-turn, and stopped. A girl had been walk
ing along the side of the road, partially hidden from Li’l Bit’s view by the magnolias. Li’l Bit thought it was Laurel McCready, although that could have been her imagination. Laurel had been on her mind a lot lately, not that she would ever admit that to Maggie. The truck picked up the girl and drove off. The highway was deserted again.

  Li’l Bit lowered herself into the old wooden rocker that had been built for her father and was strong enough to take her weight. The medical examiner had taken away his black-plastic-covered gurney. Soon he would be discovering answers she already knew, to questions she and Peggy and Maggie had agonized over months before. Then it would all be over. She looked at the porch swing Maggie still used every afternoon when she came over, even though she had to hoist herself up into it and her feet dangled above the floor. Peggy’s wicker chair was next to it, the seat padded and upholstered with a fabric of pink cabbage roses, the frame so fancy with Victorian curlicues it looked more like the work of a mad pastry chef than a chair.

  How many times had she sat on this porch with people she loved sharing hot or cold beverages with, depending on the weather, and talking? Talk was her hobby, her sport of choice, her lifeline. Talk was what made her what she was.

  “Different,” Maggie had said once. “We’re different.”

  “Actually, we’re weird,” Peggy said.

  Li’l Bit herself used the word outsider.

  But however you said it, it added up to the same thing. They were not like most people they knew.

  THE SHAPING OF HER CHARACTER had started here on the porch with her father, Harrison Banning III. She sat at his feet, absorbing his maverick’s passion for radical ideas and his loneliness. She had always been his girl. Mama was a great beauty, but highly strung and given to “moods.” At times, the mere sight of her oversized daughter could drive her to a frenzy. “Get out of my sight, you big clumsy thing!” she would scream. Then she would sob, “My baby, my poor little baby!” until Millie, the housekeeper, managed to coax her upstairs to bed and soothe her to sleep.

  And Daddy would take Li’l Bit out on the porch and try to make it better by explaining that Mama didn’t mean to be hurtful, it was just that she’d never gotten over the loss of Li’l Bit’s older brother, who died before she was born. And Li’l Bit would try to believe him, even when she overheard Mama laughing with her friends and calling her “my child, the horse,” or “the Giantess.” Or when she moaned, “Why can’t you at least develop a sense of humor? A homely girl can be popular if she can make people laugh.” But Li’l Bit remained solemn and shy and unpopular—especially with kids her own age. Daddy said not to worry. “They’re ordinary and you’re special,” he said. “Wear their rejection as your red badge of courage, Li’l Bit.”