The Three Miss Margarets

by Louise Shaffer

  “There were many white people in town who were happy to believe it,” said Li’l Bit. “It was more comfortable for them to think that two black men got into a fight over a woman instead of having to ask questions about the Garrisons from whom all blessings flowed. Besides, there were people who had thought for years that Lottie and her whole family didn’t know their place. And Richard had gotten a white man’s job. So some people were glad to see them get their comeuppance.”

  “No one knew who started the story. But Dalton was a man people listened to,” said Dr. Maggie.

  Laurel nodded.

  Maggie watched Laurel. She wished they could write out the rest of the story and hand it to her to read when they weren’t around. Or maybe make a videocassette, with all of them taking turns talking. She thought she’d heard of wills being done that way, or had she seen it on TV?

  She didn’t want to live through it again. She was too old. But if anyone had suggested sparing her, she would have been spitting mad, she knew that. So she had to get on with it.

  “When the stories about Nella started, I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “It was too cruel. Nella had lost her husband, and her little girl was in shock. Vashti couldn’t remember anything about that night. She could barely talk.

  “Li’l Bit and I were convinced Grady and John had killed Richard. And we were convinced Peggy knew it.”

  SHE AND PEGGY HAD IT OUT after Richard’s funeral, when Peggy couldn’t look any of them in the eye and Maggie smelled liquor on her breath.

  “I know that man is your husband, but you have to stop lying for him,” Maggie said. “Forget what it’s doing to Nella and Lottie, they’ll get past this. Even Vashti will survive. But you won’t.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Don’t try to tell me you don’t know what I mean. You’re betraying people you care about. You’re letting a horrible miscarriage of justice be done, all so Dalton Garrison can tell himself his son is just a troubled boy.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “Grady raped you. Are you going to let him get away with murder now?”

  “Whatever I do, it’s not for Grady—”

  “It’s for Dalton. I understand that.”

  “No, you don’t. You and Li’l Bit will never understand what Dalt’s done for me. Where do you think I’d be now if he hadn’t married me?”

  “You don’t have to be grateful—”

  “Yes, I do. You two don’t know. Li’l Bit has been rich her whole life. You’re smart and educated and you can earn your keep. You’ve never been afraid. You’ve had it easy.”

  The memory flashed through Maggie’s mind of two little girls watching in horror as the barn floor beneath them burst into flames. She thought of the days following the fire when she thought the shame would crush her, and the years afterward when she hid in Atlanta. Until she finally gave in and gave up on a chunk of life that most people considered a birthright.

  She had turned and walked out. If she hadn’t been so angry, maybe she would have stayed. And maybe she would have talked Peggy into telling the truth. And maybe the rest of it wouldn’t have happened. There were so many maybes.

  IN THE DARKNESS, Peggy said, “I’ve always wondered if I could have stopped it.”

  Li’l Bit said, “I’ve always wondered if I started it.” She turned to Laurel. “We were all angry about what was being done to Nella. Then we heard about John Merrick getting the job at the resort.”

  LI’L BIT LEANED BACK IN HER CHAIR. She remembered when she heard about John getting Richard’s job. It made her so mad she couldn’t sleep. Walter found her in the middle of the night pacing in the garden outside the bedroom. “This is about John Merrick, isn’t it?” he’d said.

  She’d told Walter about Richard getting the job away from John. It was one of the rare times when she talked to him about anything that even skirted close to race. He hadn’t said anything, but she was afraid he might sympathize with the plight of a white man who had a job taken away from him so a black man could have it. If he did think that way, she didn’t want to know it.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

  But Walter wasn’t going to let the subject go. “You think John Merrick killed that man to get his job back. That’s why you’re out here wearing holes in your bedroom slippers. You’re judging that man, and you don’t know for sure what happened.”

  “Oh, yes, I do.”

  “Because he’s poor white trash—”

  “Because it’s how he and Grady operate. Because Dalton covers up for Grady, and they think they can get away with anything, and they’re right.”

  “Margaret, you’re not being fair. You don’t know Merrick. You’ve never even talked to the man.”

  Walter didn’t mean she should actually confront John. She knew that. It was just one of the nastier ironies of the whole nightmare that he was the one who planted the idea in her head.

  “I FOUND YOUR FATHER working at the Gardens,” Li’l Bit said to Laurel, “and I started talking to him about Richard and the accident. He tried to be casual, as if it had nothing to do with him, but I didn’t believe him. I said Maggie and I were convinced that the sheriff was lying. And I said Nella and Lottie weren’t going to let it drop. Then I lied and I said Vashti’s memory was starting to come back, and I was sure it was just a matter of time before she could tell us what had really happened. I’m not sure what I thought I was doing. I wanted to get through to him, to frighten him. It was one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made.”

  THEY WERE COMING TO THE END, Laurel could feel it. And for a second she wasn’t sure she wanted them to go on. She’d lived with questions all her life, and believed that everything would be better if she had answers. But what if it wasn’t?

  “The night it happened, Dalton was out of town,” said Miss Peggy. “He’d been finding excuses to be away ever since Richard was killed. I think he was waiting for things to die down. I was alone in the house.”

  “I was in my bedroom,” said Miss Li’l Bit.

  “I was at Lottie’s cabin,” said Dr. Maggie. “I’d been going over there every evening to check up on Vashti.” The three women exchanged another one of their looks. Then Dr. Maggie went on.

  “Nella and Lottie and I were in the main room. We saw headlights coming down the drive. It was still light out, but just barely. All three of us rushed out onto the porch. I’m not sure why we did that. You’d think after what happened to Richard we’d have stayed inside. But we went out. John Merrick drove up in that red car of his. He stopped the car, slammed the door, and started for the cabin. I remember hearing the cabin door behind me open. I thought it was Nella or Lottie opening it for some reason. I never even turned to look.

  “John called out, ‘I want to talk to you!’ And for one ridiculous moment I thought, Oh, it’s all right. If that’s all he wants, it’s fine. And the truth is, we don’t know if that’s all he did want. But he was walking toward the house so fast, and he was so angry. . . . I turned to Lottie to say maybe we should go back inside. Then I heard a sound coming from my left. At first I thought something had exploded. Then I realized it was a gun going off. John screamed, and in the half-light I could see his hand go to his chest, just above the heart. I turned and Vashti was standing between Lottie and me on the porch. She had her father’s hunting gun in her hands. Richard took her hunting with him sometimes. He always said she was a good shot.

  “Someone yelled ‘Vashti!’ I think it was Nella. But the child wasn’t hearing. There was the sound of another shot. And John was on the ground. Lottie made a move toward Vashti. So did I. But she was already off the porch. And I was so stunned. We all were. All we could do was watch.

  “John was lying on the ground, I believe he was dead by then. I think I remember the coroner said the second bullet was probably the one that killed him. Vashti kept on moving until she was standing over him. She looked at him for what seemed like a long time. God knows what was
going through her mind. Then she dropped the gun.

  It was silent on the porch. “But my father didn’t kill Richard,” Laurel whispered. “He wasn’t the one.”

  “It was dark out. She saw him come out of the same car. And he was a white man,” said Miss Li’l Bit.

  “But he didn’t kill anyone,” Laurel repeated. Because it was so important to keep saying it out loud.

  “No,” said Dr. Maggie. “And Grady didn’t kill him.”

  MAGGIE SIGHED. If only it weren’t all still so clear in her mind. Her memory was failing her in so many ways these days, why couldn’t a little fortuitous senility wipe out that night? It seemed only fair. But she could still see it as if it were happening all over again.

  VASHTI DROPPED THE GUN and Nella ran to her.

  “Momma?” Vashti said. Nella tried to lead her away from the gun and the dead man on the ground, but Vashti wouldn’t move. She stared at the man she had killed, and in a voice that didn’t have any feeling she told them what had happened the night her daddy died. When she was through, Nella still couldn’t move her.

  Next to Maggie on the porch, Lottie said softly, “No. Please, no.”

  But it had happened. And there was nothing to be done. Through the shock Maggie could see it start to sink in for all of them. Numbed brains were putting it together quickly. In one minute, a man had died and Vashti’s life had ended. The wonderful future they’d all envisioned was gone. Now they had to start thinking in terms of consequences and how to save her from the worst of them.

  “She’s only a child,” Maggie said.

  “She killed a white man,” said Lottie.

  “She had a mental breakdown because she saw her father murdered,” Maggie said. “We can prove that. We’ll get her the best lawyers.”

  Lottie turned to her and Maggie knew what she was going to see in her face, the defeat and the despair. But the Lottie who looked at her came from years ago, before so many losses had taken their toll. This was the Lottie who climbed pecan trees to the highest branches and talked her into stealing fruitcake batter from Charlie Mae’s big ceramic bowl.

  “We can’t let this happen, Maggie,” Lottie said.

  ON THE PORCH, Peggy watched Maggie. She looked weary, but not as bad as Peggy had been afraid she’d be. Maggie said in a ragged voice, “We decided we couldn’t let Vashti take the blame. So I called Li’l Bit and Peggy.”

  It was a call Peggy would never forget.

  MAGGIE’S VOICE HAD BEEN CALM on the phone. She just gave Peggy the bare bones of what had happened. By the time Peggy got to the cabin, Li’l Bit was already there.

  “I’m going to drive Lottie and Vashti into Atlanta to stay with a friend of mine,” said Maggie. “We have to get Vashti away from here. So I won’t be here to corroborate what Nella and Li’l Bit are going to tell the police.”

  “What are you going to say?” Peggy had asked, dread making her mouth dry.

  They were going to say Grady did it. That he and John got into a fight over Nella—and Grady shot John. Li’l Bit was going to say she was a witness. Then, when she got back, Maggie would back up the story by saying she’d seen Grady at the cabin since Richard died, and John had come too, at different times. Which would play on the rumors that were already circulating. And of all the things they were throwing at Peggy, that was the one that stuck in her brain.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t do that to Nella.”

  But Nella was standing next to Lottie, holding her mother’s hand so tight it had to be stopping the circulation and saying it was what she wanted. “We have to have a way to explain it,” she said.

  “We need you too, Peggy,” Maggie said.

  “No.”

  “You have to help,” said Li’l Bit.

  “I can’t. Please don’t ask me.”

  And the duet had begun in earnest.

  “It’s justice,” said Li’l Bit.

  “It’s for Vashti,” said Maggie.

  “Grady deserves to be punished.”

  “Vashti doesn’t.”

  And then Lottie, who had never begged for anything in her life, was begging. And Nella was still holding Lottie’s hand as she begged too. And sitting there, silently watching her with haunted eyes no child should have, was Vashti.

  It all came at her so fast and hard there wasn’t time to think. Later, she couldn’t actually remember saying yes.

  IT WAS NOW PITCH BLACK on the porch, but Laurel could see Miss Peggy rub her hands together for warmth.

  “It won’t be much longer,” she said. “We’re almost at the end.

  “We had to report the shooting. Maggie left for Atlanta with Lottie and Vashti. We were going to say they’d left late that afternoon to take Vashti there for a doctor’s appointment the next day. Then I drove past Grady’s villa to see if the lights were on. I’m not sure what we would have done if he wasn’t home. But we were lucky. I guess you could call it luck. I went back to the cabin, we wiped the fingerprints off the gun Vashti had used, and I took it home. I put it in Dalt’s gun cabinet. Then I waited.”

  “I was the one who called the police,” Miss Li’l Bit said. “I told them I’d been in my bedroom, and I’d seen John’s car drive by, and since I’d seen Grady go by earlier I ran out to the top of the ridge to see what was going on. I told them Richard’s death had made me nervous, and I was afraid something else might happen.” She paused. “I said I got there in time to see John get out of the car, and Grady come out of the cabin, and then I saw Grady shoot John. I described it exactly the way Maggie said it happened. But I said it was Grady. I said he had the gun with him when he got into his car and drove away.”

  Miss Peggy went on. “Later, when the police showed up to question me, I said I’d seen Grady sneak into the house and put the gun in the cabinet. When they tested it, of course it matched the bullets from John’s body.” She paused. “Things were going so fast I thought sure they’d catch us up on something we’d forgotten or didn’t know.”

  Dr. Maggie said, “All I could think was, we had to protect Vashti.”

  “We didn’t trust the sheriff or Dalton or the town to be fair,” said Miss Li’l Bit. “We had to take care of it ourselves.”

  “I think what made it seem reasonable was, it fit with the other rumors,” said Dr. Maggie. “It explained what had happened earlier. The story was, Grady and John killed Richard, and then Grady killed John. And that was the story that stuck.”

  It seemed at last that they were through. In the darkness they turned to Laurel.

  “Grady had never paid for anything he’d done and he never would have if we hadn’t done what we did,” said Miss Li’l Bit.

  “Lottie and Nella had been through so much, they didn’t deserve to lose Vashti too,” said Maggie.

  “And Vashti didn’t deserve to have her life destroyed before it started,” said Miss Peggy.

  “But my mother deserved what happened to her?” Laurel’s voice cracked through the night air. She’d stopped shivering. She hadn’t noticed when she started getting warm. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No,” said Dr. Maggie. “But Vashti’s need was so urgent.”

  “And my ma’s wasn’t? What about me? What about my needs?”

  “What we did was the lesser of two evils,” said Miss Li’l Bit.

  “And you were the ones who got to decide that?”

  “We didn’t know your mother was going to have a baby,” Dr. Maggie said.

  “But the truth is,” said Miss Peggy, “we weren’t thinking about Sara Jayne. We were faced with a little girl who was in trouble—”

  “I was a little girl. I spent most of my life in trouble.”

  “We all tried to help your mother and you,” said Dr. Maggie. “Each of us tried.”

  “Charity. When all my ma wanted was the truth.”

  “We couldn’t,” said Dr. Maggie.

  “She had a right to know, damn it! I had a right to know my father didn’t kill anyone.
”

  “Yes, you did,” Miss Peggy started to say, but Miss Li’l Bit interrupted. “Your father didn’t kill Richard,” she said, “but he went to the cabin to beat him into giving up his job. And he went back later to scare Richard’s family after I stupidly let him know we were suspicious of him. I’m sorry if it hurts you to hear this, but John Merrick was not a man for you to be proud of. I wish he hadn’t died, for all our sakes. I’m sorry it was so hard on your mother. But she didn’t have to let it ruin her life, and she didn’t have to do what she did to you. That was her choice. My choice was to save a little girl and punish a murderer. I’ll take full responsibility for that.”

  She spoke with the authority Laurel had longed to hear from Sara Jayne when she was small, and that made her hate Miss Li’l Bit even more.

  “Grady Garrison was killed in jail,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Miss Li’l Bit. “He got into a fight and he was killed.”

  Laurel turned to Peggy. “He was your stepson,” she said. “You sent a rich white boy to the state prison. You had to know what was going to happen.”

  “He was a rich white man, not a boy,” said Dr. Maggie. “And he was guilty of murder. He killed Richard.”

  “He belonged in jail,” said Miss Li’l Bit.

  “And you got to judge that?” Laurel knew she was shouting, but she couldn’t stop. “You got to play judge and jury? No. You played God.”

  “We took responsibility—” said Li’l Bit.

  “You played God! You old—” But she stopped herself. And forced herself to look at them. They were sitting facing her, three tired women who had just admitted to more crimes than Laurel could count, and they still looked virtuous and respectable and . . . so goddamn right.

  “Well, you sure have been busy,” she said, more calmly. “Running around deciding who gets to live and who gets to go to jail and get their brains beat out. Maybe now it’s my turn. Maybe I’ll decide to make you pay.” And before she really lost it, she got herself off the porch and into her car and drove as fast as she could down Miss Li’l Bit’s perfect driveway.