Ohmygosh! She lifted the gun, but her hand trembled, and her face was about the same color as her lipstick. Fronie Temple had probably shoved Aunt Caroline down the stairs, run down Bonita Moody in the dark of night, and no telling what she’d done to Kent Coffey, but having to shoot somebody face to face was playing on her nerves. A tremor went through her.
“Actually, I think your singing’s the worst,” I said. “A joke. Everybody’s laughing. Half the congregation wears earplugs.” I was getting high on this. Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier?
“Stop! That’s not true!” When Fronie Temple screamed, I let fly a fistful of dirt as close to her eyes as I could get and dived for her knees.
The gun flew somewhere in the bushes, and Fronie doubled over like a big bag of laundry and landed on her hands and knees in the dirt. “You can’t talk to me like that! I’ll show you!” Crying, she started crawling toward a tangle of honeysuckle on the fallen log and I saw the ugly gleam of metal beneath the leaves.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I sprang over her back like a child playing leapfrog and stomped hard on her outstretched fingers just as she reached for the gun.
This time I think Fronie Temple actually hit high F—and she’d been trying for years, but she didn’t seem pleased about it. When the screaming and jumping around subsided, she saw that I held the gun, and I’ll swear if her attitude didn’t do a complete turnaround.
“I don’t know what came over me, Mary George,” she said with a sickly little smile. “It must be my medication. Heart palpitations, don’t you know? Nerves, the doctor says. Pure stress. I just can’t imagine what made me do that.”
“Ask me if I care,” I said, and got a firmer grip on the revolver. I can’t stand guns, don’t even like to touch them, but I couldn’t take a chance on this crazy woman getting her hands on it again. But what was I going to do with her? And where on earth were the keys to my car?
Then a gleam caught my eye, and there they were in plain sight just a few feet away in a spot where I was sure I’d looked earlier. And when I picked them up, I knew Augusta was there. Well, it was about time.
“Fronie, old girl,” I said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here for a while. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable under that nice tree, and I imagine somebody will be along to see to you in a little while.” I squinted at the sun. “As you said, there’s plenty of daylight left.”
“Where are you going? What are you going to do? You’re not going to leave me here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Oh, but I am. Can’t very well drive and keep an eye on you, can I? I wouldn’t touch that door handle, Fronie. That’s right, get away from the car—way away. Somebody should be here shortly.”
“But I won’t try anything … really. You don’t have to worry about me … . I wouldn’t hurt you, Mary George. I wouldn’t hurt anybody … .”
I could still hear her pleading as I backed the car to turn around. I hoped she would be there by the time the police came.
“Quick thinking, Mary George Murphy! I’d say you handled that situation very well.” Suddenly Augusta was beside me beaming.
“And no thanks to you. Those car keys were right under her nose. If Fronie had seen them, I’d have been a goner.”
“Ah, but she wasn’t going to see them,” my angel said.
“Damn it, Augusta, how do you know? You weren’t even there.”
Augusta ran her fingers through her long, gingery hair and let it flow behind her. “Oh, I do wish you’d watch your language. Not only was I there,” she said, “but I was standing on them.”
“Well, well,” Uncle Ben said, “I’ve always wanted to identify myself with that droll adventurer, Mark Twain, and I’m delighted to see we actually have something in common.”
“And how is that?” Sam asked.
“The reports of my death—impending death, in my case—are greatly exaggerated.”
My face turned hot, and if the table hadn’t had a glass top, I might have crawled under it, but my uncle’s uncluttered sunroom offered no such place to hide.
Our dinner together had been postponed after my unfortunate confrontation with phony Fronie, and now, a couple of weeks later, Delia, Sam, and I were guests for a nutritious meal of pasta, and vegetables, fruit, and a delicious whole grain bread served warm with honey.
Uncle Ben himself, refreshed after a short nap following his daily three-mile swim, looked firm, fit, and not much over fifty—although he admitted to seventy, and was probably closer to eighty.
He seemed a happy man sitting there in his comfortable high-backed wicker chair with a cross-eyed Siamese in his lap and a brandy in his hand. “I’ve enjoyed good health, good friends, and a good, long life,” he told us, stroking the cat’s cream-and-brown back. “But now I’m getting my affairs in order.”
And from the looks exchanged between my uncle and his attractive, middle-aged secretary, Ava, that wasn’t all he was getting, I thought. No doubt about it, Uncle Ben was a happy man.
And a shrewd one. He had seen through Fronie Temple at once. “A coarse, yeller-haired baggage! That’s what she was when poor, gullible Fain married her, and that’s what she is today. Why, the silly woman actually tried to flirt with me. I can’t imagine why she’d think I’d leave her one cent.” My uncle pondered his brandy. “No class. Absolutely no class at all.”
“No conscience either, apparently,” Delia said. “They found sleeping pills dissolved in the Thermos of coffee in that fellow’s car—the one who went off the mountain. He must’ve fallen asleep.”
Kent Coffey had suffered severe injuries and it would be a good long time before he’d be able to live normally. Fortunately he had managed to crawl away from the wreckage before his car fell to the bottom of the deep ravine.
In a way, I guess Kent was lucky. And so was I. Not only had Sam and I found each other, but Delia was going to take over the business end of Camp Summerwood, and with Cindy coming back as cook, we had a good start on our staff.
I say “our staff” even though I’m not on it, not officially anyway, unless you count weekend volunteers. But I start back to school part-time this fall, and if all goes well, I should be able to get my degree in a couple of years. And Uncle Ben—bless his big old fat checkbook—insists on paying my tuition, although I doubt I’ll inherit a cent. After all, it looks like he’s planning to hang on awhile longer, at least I hope he will. But Sam and I have persuaded him to set up an endowment for the camp. The new main hall will be named for him, of course, and with continued support and a challenging faculty, such as Sam (and eventually me), Summerwood should soon be back on its feet.
Now the ceiling fan whirred as I sipped ice water with a wedge of lime. All afternoon I had kept an eye out for “Igor,” listened for the heavy shuffle of his feet, but he had yet to put in an appearance. Maybe it was his day off.
My great-uncle Ben set aside his snifter, folded his hands, and looked at me. “If your friend Delia hadn’t called to see if I’d heard from you when everything came to a boil the other day, I wouldn’t have known what was going on.”
Sam laughed. “Then I guess you didn’t catch the five o’clock news. Delia and I were out scouting the countryside for Mary G. when they announced over the radio about Fronie and the tomato truck.”
The image was so comical it made me forget my brief efforts to be dignified, and I giggled, picturing my former landlady rolling around in a load of produce.
It seems the driver of the truck had stopped to relieve himself near the spot where I left Fronie and she took the opportunity to hitch a ride in back while he wasn’t looking.
Fortunately, the police caught up with them a few miles down the road, but not before the troopers’ car got “bombed” with exploding red fruit.
“I knew something was wrong,” Sam told him, “when Mary G. didn’t show up for barbecue. She might stand me up, but she’d never turn down a good batch of Brunswick stew, so I gave Delia a call and she wa
s just about frantic.”
“Fronie had phoned earlier pretending to be someone calling from the vet’s,” Delia said. “Told me Mary George asked her to say she’d be leaving an hour later than we planned. Of course when I went to meet her she was already gone, and Doc Nichols said nobody had called from there.”
Uncle Ben shook his head. “Fronie won’t be calling anybody for a long time now, except maybe her lawyer!”
He narrowed his eyes and frowned at me. “Mary George Murphy, why do you keep twisting about in that chair? Would you like a pillow, or do you need to be excused?”
“Sorry. I was kind of hoping to meet your butler Igor—I mean, what’s his name? Milford … What? What’s so funny?”
My uncle laughed until tears trickled down his well-preserved old cheeks. “There is no Milford,” he said when he finally stopped for breath.
“No Milford? Then who answered the phone when I called? Said you couldn’t be disturbed. That was you … you! It was you, wasn’t it?”
My uncle winked at me and smiled. “Somebody has to screen my calls. Besides, when you get to be my age, you have to liven things up once in a while.
“Now, don’t look at me like that, my dear. Just because I concocted an imaginary butler doesn’t necessarily mean I’m crazy. We all need a little fantasy now and then.”
“I won’t argue with that,” I said.
But had Augusta Goodnight been a fantasy? Someone I invented out of my own desperation? No one had seen her but me, and after Fronie’s tomato chase and subsequent incarceration, she had appeared for shorter durations. And there was a wistful kind of joy about her. She reminded me of the way Aunt Caroline looked the night I graduated from Troublesome Creek High. I knew she was trying to tell me good-bye.
The smell of coffee greeted me when I got home from my uncle’s that night. Strong coffee. And there Augusta sat in the kitchen with the half-empty pot at her elbow. When she saw me, she smiled and raised her cup. “To you, Mary George Murphy. Congratulations.”
“You’re leaving me,” I said. “Why?”
“You can take care of yourself. And very well, I might add. My job here is done.” And she quickly rose and kissed me, brushed my cheek with her strawberry-scented lips. I heard a soft sort of flutter and my eyes got swimmy hot. “I’ll miss you, Augusta,” I whispered.
“Don’t cry, now,” she said. And I didn’t. I closed my eyes for a minute, and when I opened them she was gone. But there’s a sweet, brave place inside me that wasn’t there before.
ALSO BY
Mignon F. Ballard
Minerva Cries Murder
Final Curtain
The Widow’s Woods
Deadly Promise
Cry at Dusk
Raven Rock
Aunt Matilda’s Ghost
ANGEL AT TROUBLESOME CREEK. Copyright © 1999 by
Mignon F. Ballard. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Design by Heidi Eriksen
eISBN 9781466802742
First eBook Edition : October 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ballard, Mignon Franklin.
Angel at Troublesome Creek : a mystery / by Mignon F. Ballard.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-24175-5
I. Title
PS3552.A466A84 1999
813’.54—dc21
99—33543
CIP
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: November 1999
Angel at Troublesome Creek Page 19