Angel at Troublesome Creek
Page 18
And a little doom-saying moth flitted inside my head, whispering, Something’s wrong … something’s wrong … .
According to the map I had bought back at the store, we were a good half hour from Albemarle, and then it would take another twenty minutes or more to get on the interstate and head east toward Raleigh and Rocky Mount. With luck, and if a big rock didn’t fall on me, we just might make Uncle Ben’s by five as Igor had instructed.
The sun was bright and the asphalt road shimmered in the glare. My eyes ached. My head ached. There were too many thoughts in there. Too many doubts. What was that Doc had said? If somebody had broken into my house from the outside, the glass would’ve been in the sink, on the kitchen countertop. But the window had shattered onto the ground below, which must mean someone wanted us to think the prowler got in through the window. Why? It had to be so the police wouldn’t suspect they had let themselves in with a key.
Doc Nichols had a key to my back door so he could get in to take care of Hairy, but I had only given it to him that morning. On the night of the fire, only one other person besides myself had a key to my apartment.
“Mary George, if I don’t get something to eat pretty soon, I’m going to be sick,” Fronie said. “That looks like a right shady place up ahead there. Why don’t you pull off and I’ll fix us a plate of lunch?”
“We don’t have time to stop,” I said. “Just reach back there and grab something from the basket.”
But Fronie grabbed her stomach instead and leaned forward with a horrible groan. “Oh, Lord, you’ve got to stop! I’m sick as a dog! Must be that candy bar I ate back there …” And she made the kind of noise you don’t like to hear when you’ve just washed and vacuumed your car.
I pulled off onto a wide sandy turnaround and Fronie slid out and disappeared behind the large oaks that shaded the area. My hand hesitated over the button that locks the doors. I could leave her here and drive away. I could, and I wanted to. But what if I was wrong? The woman seemed genuinely ill. If something happened to her, I would be responsible.
My handbag with the Bible inside was jammed between my seat and the driver’s side door within reassuring touch, and I felt inside to be sure the Good Book was there. Even though it had never left my side, it was comforting to feel the bulky shape, the worn old cover—and something else. Some kind of paper folded in half.
I’d almost forgotten the page from Troublesome Creek Cooks I had found on my seat earlier. Now I drew it out and looked at the recipe once more. I was right. Aunt Caroline had hurriedly circled the recipe for the coffee dessert, and below the directions and list of ingredients was the name of the person who had submitted it. Fronie Temple.
She had the door open before I could snap the lock and drive away. She also had a gun. A revolver. It could’ve been a toy, but it looked like a real one to me, and the barrel was pointed in my direction.
“Just pull on around behind those trees,” Fronie directed. “Wouldn’t want anybody seeing us from the road.” And she stuck that ugly thing right in my face.
With the barrel nudging my ear, I backed and turned down a red dirt trail bordered by blackberry bushes and scrub pine. Overgrown now, probably it had once been used as a field road, and the car bucked and bumped over ruts and stones, limbs squeaked against the sides. Cautiously I crept around a sharp curve, then came to a sudden stop. A large pine had fallen across the road.
“Why are you stopping?” Fronie demanded.
I pointed to the obstacle in front of us. “I can’t go any farther.”
“Then give me the keys and get out.”
From the half-open window came the fresh smell of pine, but the July heat was stifling, and the only thing that moved was the powdery copper dust settling around us. When would they find me here?
Something happened to me then. A cooling spring of calmness welled inside me, and I knew I didn’t want to die. I jerked the keys from the ignition and tossed them out the window, tossed them into the rust-frosted tangle of weeds. I couldn’t fight this crazy woman with a gun, but I could make things tough for the old witch.
And that’s exactly what she looked like with her Halloween hair and her ridiculous striped hat. “Guess you’ll have to hitchhike now,” I said, and waited to meet my Maker.
But I guess my Maker wasn’t receiving visitors because nothing happened. Tossing her hat onto the seat behind her, Fronie opened her door and tramped around to mine. “Get out!” she said. “Get out and find them. You’ll crawl around on your hands and knees until you do, Miss High and Mighty.” And she wrenched open my door and prodded my shoulder with the gun. The gun gave Fronie power and she liked that. She could make me do what she wanted, but she couldn’t control how I did it, or what I said. Fronie Temple needed me. For now.
“You killed Aunt Caroline,” I said. And I knew it was true. She didn’t deny it. “All along,” I said, “you’ve been after this Bible. My Bible. Why? What possible use is it to you?”
Fronie leaned against the car and smiled. “I told you I had relatives in Hunters’ Oak—relative, that is. Your long-lost great-uncle Benjamin was my husband’s uncle too—my first husband, Fain. He and your father were first cousins. Fain died before I came here, before I married Braswell Temple, but he’s closer kin to the old man than you are. As his widow, I’m entitled to inherit what would’ve come to him.”
With one hand Fronie wiped the moisture from her brow, and with the other she waved the gun in my direction, all the time keeping distance between us. “Hurry up—look over there—in those weeds yonder!”
I dropped to my knees, but I wasn’t looking for the keys, I was looking for a rock, a sharp stick, anything I could use as a weapon against her. If what she said was true, Fain Murphy must have descended from the third son, Ben’s brother Horace. Fain was the cousin who died in Korea.
“Does Uncle Ben know about you?” I asked, pretending to search the grass.
“Of course he does. I was over there not too long ago, took him a loaf of my apple-broccoli bread. Fain was his father’s only surviving child, you know, and his uncle was fond of him in his way.” She slapped at a mosquito. “I like to think he’s fond of me as well. I’m sure he means to remember me in his will—after all, who else does he have to leave it to?”
Well, there was me, but in my present situation, I sort of hated to remind her.
All those years the family Bible had sat on the bookshelf in Aunt Caroline’s living room and nobody paid a bit of attention to it. “Why now?” I asked. “Have you always known who I was?”
“Never even thought of it until I mentioned to Caroline once that my first husband came from Hunters’ Oak and she said your people had lived there too. Since they had the same last name, I suggested maybe they were related. That’s when Caroline told me about the Bible. ‘We could look it up,’ she said. But we never did. That was twelve or thirteen years ago, soon after I came here.
“Besides, I got the notion the wonderful Miss Caroline would just as soon not have family connections with the likes of me!” Fronie sniffed. “Anyway, I forgot all about it, and so did she, I reckon, until that article came out in the paper about Ben.”
The woman moved closer to stand over me, her footsteps sounded like a death rattle in the dry grass. “I don’t think you’re trying, Mary George, I really don’t.” She drew a wide circle with her foot. “Scrape up all the leaves here, pine needles too. They’ve got to be here somewhere. I’ll wait.” And she made herself comfortable in the shade of a hickory tree. I knew it was a hickory tree because I kept finding last year’s squirrel-chewed nut shells. If I had a rubber band I could shoot them at her like David did to Goliath—only I’d probably miss. But when Fronie wasn’t looking, I scooped a palmful of sandy soil into the pocket of my skirt.
“If your aunt hadn’t become so suspicious, she’d be alive today,” Fronie said, fanning herself with a small branch of leaves. “She showed me that Bible, don’t you know, right after she came across it last spr
ing. Forgot all about my Fain being kin too, and naturally I didn’t mention it.
“But when I’d ask her about the Bible after that, she’d put me off, said she didn’t know where it was.” When Fronie Temple smiled she reminded me of a dog baring its teeth. She smiled now. “She knew very well where it was.
“She and that Delia—always thought they were so high muck-ety-muck them and their I’ll Try Society! Well, she’s not so special now!”
Aunt Caroline had taught me we weren’t supposed to hate, but I hated Fronie Temple. Hated her greed and her vanity and her selfishness—traits common to most of us to a certain degree, but Fronie Temple was just slapdab evil. “You didn’t have to kill her,” I said.
“Oh, but I did. I had to stop her, didn’t I, before you saw where you belonged on the family tree? It should’ve stopped right there. You never would’ve known. The old man would die, I would inherit, and that would be that.” Fronie stroked the grip of her revolver. “I really did care for your Aunt Caroline in spite of her being such a snob. She was good to help with my music, and don’t think I’m not grateful. Why, it was me who got the music committee to commission Caroline’s portrait.”
“Kent Coffey. And he was to look for the Bible while he painted, I suppose?” I added a rock to my pile of debris, but it was too small to do any good.
“Certainly not! Why, that was before I even knew Fain’s uncle Ben was still alive.” She seemed genuinely insulted. “Kent came to me as a tenant—such a good-looking young man, don’t you think? But he was always short of money, and I’d seen some of his work, so I recommended him for the job. As far as I know, the portrait turned out just fine, although God knows what he did with it.”
This woman either didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, or she just didn’t give a damn. I knew now Fronie had written the note “from Delia” I’d found on my door, and I’m sure she never called the barbecue place at all. It must have been Fronie watching from across the street when I left Delia’s that night we found the key in the cookie jar. I wondered if she’d left a tape of herself singing so I’d think she never left home.
Through the trees I could see cars passing on the road behind her, but no one would think to look for me here. By now Delia and Sam would know something was wrong, but they’d never suspect Fronie Temple. My knees ached from squatting and I scratched a couple of ant bites on my leg. My mouth felt as dry as the dust in my pocket and sweat trickled slowly down my cheek, oozed between my breasts. I thought of the cool creek at Summerwood, rain splashing on sidewalks, a tall glass of ice water.
Fronie sipped from a Thermos of iced tea she’d taken from her hamper and glanced at her watch. “Keep looking, Mary George. We have plenty of daylight yet.” She pointed to a patch of weeds behind me. “Why haven’t you looked over there?”
I hadn’t looked over there because that was where I threw the keys—or at least I thought it was. But the gun was persuasive, so I obliged, adding a little more dirt to my supply. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the bulging pocket. Fronie had resumed her seat under the tree and I looked up to find her staring at me with an expression that made me almost as nervous as the gun. She rattled the ice in her cup and drained the contents.
“And how did you find Kent?” she asked.
“What do you mean, how did I find him?”
Fronie showed her teeth again. “I think you know what I mean.”
Gold gleamed from the crowns in her mouth. “I found him rather attractive,” she said. “And I’m sure he felt the same way about me.” She giggled girlishly. “A woman can sense these things.”
“He set that fire, didn’t he?” I wanted to throw up.
“Actually I did that,” Fronie admitted. “Kent had some rather peculiar standards, but he did keep an eye on you for me. Actually, I think he rather enjoyed it, Mary George. You bewitched him, I’m afraid. Got to where I just couldn’t trust him. Pity. The two of us would have been good for each other. Why, he might’ve lived rent free.”
I thought of the radio announcement about the white Honda going off the side of the mountain and it made me sick. I don’t know how she managed it, but I knew Fronie Temple was responsible, just as I knew she had used that woman’s car to run down Bonita Moody. And poor Bonita hadn’t the least idea who Fronie was.
And now it was my time.
“You’ve fooled around long enough!” Fronie Temple threw down her cup and stalked in circles about me. “I can see I’ll have to look for those keys myself. You can either help me find them or stand there until I do. I’m going to have to kill you anyway—it really doesn’t matter when. Nobody’s going to hear. Nobody’s going to see.”
I stood slowly, my heart melting into the red soil at my feet. I was so scared my teeth locked together. I couldn’t yell if I wanted to. Was I really going to die? Had Augusta Goodnight saved me for this?
I remembered the angel sitting on Aunt Caroline’s stairs in her little green suit and her frilly dot of a hat. How she’d jolted me back to reality with the sound of her no-nonsense voice. “I’ve had about enough of that,” she’d said.
And so had I. This woman had a weapon, but I had one too. Little David used a stone to topple the giant. I would sting Fronie Temple where it hurt the most, and her weakness would bring her down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
My back ached. I stretched. And oh, it felt so good!
“Why are you smiling? What are you doing?” Fronie stepped away from me. “Be still! You stay right there.”
This woman was stupid. Rotten and mean and stupid. This was going to be fun. I let go with the first of my ammunition. “It’s too late, Fronie,” I said. “A lot of people know about that Bible now. If anything happens to me, it won’t do you any good, you won’t even be able to inherit. Don’t you think they might figure out who would benefit by my death?
“You know, I just don’t believe you’ve been thinking. You are capable of thinking, aren’t you?”
“What?” She lowered the gun, just a little.
“You brought poppyseed muffins to Aunt Caroline the day you made her fall, so she had to let you in. You brought them on that pink-flowered plate, and when I ate one, it was stale. It was stale because they’d been there since before she died. But you didn’t think about that.”
“I really can’t see that it matters.” She held the gun stiffly in front of her. “Don’t you get any closer now.”
Keeping an eye on her, I inched slowly backward. I knew my aunt, and no matter how suspicious she was of Fronie Temple, Aunt Caroline would have accepted the muffins graciously. Courtesy was ingrained in her, but it betrayed her in the end.
“You followed her into the kitchen with them, all the time pretending to be her friend,” I said. “But she knew something was wrong. I guess she just didn’t realize how far you’d go.”
“How do you know? You’d never be able to prove it!” Fronie took a step closer. “Not that you’ll be around that long.”
The two of them must have spent some time in the kitchen in order for Aunt Caroline to quickly circle Fronie’s recipe in Troublesome Creek Cooks. The cookbook stayed in constant use, and was probably already open on her counter.
“In that case, you might as well tell me,” I said. “You forced her into the attic, didn’t you? But the Bible wasn’t there.”
Fronie Temple didn’t answer, but her expression told me I was right. My heart, filled with fury and pain, wanted me to throw myself on her then and there, beat her into the ground. But my head told me to wait. Fronie had a gun. I didn’t. Emotions would have to take a backseat. For now.
Somehow, while in the attic, Aunt Caroline had managed to slip the key to the post office box into the cookie jar. I think she had intended to mail it to me, probably that very day, and either had it in her pocket, or distracted Fronie long enough to put it there while they were in the kitchen. I didn’t want to know how she died—whether she fell or was pushed, but I suspected the latter.
Okay, Mary George, I thought, time for phase two. “I’m saying I don’t think you’re very bright. Except for the clothes you wear—they’re a little too bright, don’t you think? Tacky, in fact. Tight too. You’re not a size ten anymore, are you? And you’re certainly no beauty queen. Poor Kent! No wonder he was in a hurry to get away. Get real! Do you really think he cared anything about you?” My smile grew broader. Each barb went in a little deeper. Each flinch brought me pleasure. I hoped my sweet aunt Caroline, wherever she was, would forgive me. And somehow, I knew she would.
Fronie’s lip trembled. “You shut up! I’ll be glad to be rid of the both of you—you and that big, ugly dog. I wish he’d run in front of a truck when I ran him off before.”
“That was you following me, wasn’t it? The day I went to Hughes, to Summerwood. You were driving that woman’s car.”
“Oh, that. I thought you were on the way to your uncle’s in Hunters’ Oak. Had to find some way to stop you.” She shrugged. “Well, you got by me that time.”
“What were you going to do, run me off the road?” As soon as I said it, I knew it was true. I remembered an unusually narrow and dangerous stretch between Hughes and High Point. Thank goodness we had been able to give her the slip. “It really didn’t take a lot to outwit you, Fronie,” I said softly.
She looked like she’d been slapped. “Why are you saying these things to me?”
My hand closed around the dirt in my pocket, I moved a step closer. “Because they’re true. And that’s not all. You’d think you could at least follow a recipe, but your cooking stinks too. Isn’t fit to eat. Remember those squash ‘wads’ on the Fourth of July? Kent and I buried them in the park—without honors.”