Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery

by Barbara Neely

  She began with Grace's closet—a study in organization—and slipped her hand beneath and among drawers full of panties and bras, all in the same heavy cream-colored silk. She patted nightgowns and probed stacks of slips until she had only one more drawer to search.

  When she opened the last drawer, a hint of Grace's floral perfume scented the air. Neatly folded scarves rested upon one another like banked, multicolored clouds. Blanche gently lifted a few of them and held them lightly in her left hand. She wormed her right hand through the scarves to the bottom and back of the drawer. She found only more scarves. One of them managed to become snagged on the cuff of her rubber glove.

  It was a large silk square, with a cream background and big pink and mauve flowers with dusky-green leaves, like overblown gardenias. It was at the same time exotic and Victorian. Blanche complimented Grace on her choice. She folded the scarf so that a subtle pink blossom was centered on top. The color caught Blanche's attention and held her eyes. It reminded her of something she'd been trying to remember. Something about the night Nate was murdered. Something...

  Everett sneaking the limo down the drive. She saw him clearly as the car moved slowly away from the house. His arm on the window ledge was blue-white in the moonlight. Blue-white. She stared down at the scarf in her hands. Her body understood what this meant long before her brain patched the truth together. She remembered the creases in the sleeves of the pink jacket, turned back to accommodate shorter arms. She shivered. The front door slammed with a bang. Blanche dropped the scarf and headed for the back stairs.

  Grace was in the kitchen, leaning weakly against the wall. For the first time, Blanche noticed that Grace's eyes didn't match. One eye—the right—was almost almond-shaped, but her left eye was round and unwavering as a blue marble. Grace began to whimper. But there were no tears in her left eye. Her hair was full of twigs and bits of leaves. There were scratches, like strips of raw meat, on her face and neck. She was holding her right elbow in her left hand, as though she was hurt. Dirt and twigs stuck to her skirt and blouse. “What happened?” Blanche asked her.

  Grace's face twisted as though the question caused her pain. She pushed herself away from the wall. She limped to the table, leaned heavily on it, then sank slowly into a chair. “What happened?” Blanche asked her once again.

  Grace shook back her hair in one of those white-girl gestures that used to wrench Blanche's heart, when she was young and sure that being nappy-headed was a hindrance to being beautiful. Now she recognized the gesture as a play for time.

  “He...he said he was going to kill us both. He was crazy, babbling....He said it was the only way. I grabbed the wheel.... Oh, God!” She looked up wildly at Blanche. There were tears in both eyes now. Blanche took a step back from the table. “It was so awful. I was so frightened. I can't tell you how frightened I was!”

  Blanche felt like someone who'd been tricked by a red spade. She'd been too busy looking down on Grace to notice those eyes. And how had she allowed herself to believe that a person bent on unseen murder in the dark would wear a pink jacket—unless it was meant to be seen by a witness? But then, why kill the witness? As a person whose living depended on her ability to read character, Blanche was both shocked and frightened. She couldn't survive with muddled wits.

  “I've injured my arm.” Grace held her arm out for Blanche's inspection. Blanche knew she was expected to go to Grace, to make soothing sounds and call on the Lord for protection and mercy while she fluttered about, gathering first-aid items and insisting she be allowed to call the doctor and the police. It was the combination of her memory of Everett's pale arm resting on the car window ledge and Grace's unwavering left eye that made her step back instead.

  “You killed Nate.” The accusation jumped unbidden from Blanche's mouth with calm certainty.

  “Please,” Grace moaned. “My arm.” Once again she held her arm out to Blanche. Blanche neither moved nor spoke. She stared directly into Grace's eyes. After a few moments, Grace chuckled and relaxed against the back of the chair. She let her arm fall gracefully to the table. A tight-lipped, bittersweet smile played across her mouth. She looked like somebody who'd just lost a poker game she'd thought was all tied up.

  “You did kill him, didn't you? You might as well tell me. You're planning to kill me anyway. Me and the boy. You going to burn this house down, too?” Both anger and fear were present in her voice.

  “You surprise me.”

  Blanche knew exactly what Grace meant. As far as the Graces of the world were concerned, hired hands didn't think, weren't curious, or observant, or capable of drawing even the most obvious conclusions. When would they learn? “Why did you kill him?”

  “Nate.” Grace shrugged as if she couldn't think of a subject more boring.

  Blanche clenched her teeth against the urge to call her a murderous bitch. It was information, not a fight, that she was after. Was it true that murderers liked to brag about what they'd done? “Well, you sure had me fooled,” she told Grace.

  Grace smiled, but she didn't start talking. Blanche primed the pump. “Of course, Nate wasn't the only one. Where's the real Emmeline?”

  Grace rose from the table. “Miss Emmeline,” she corrected. She moved around the room touching everything she passed: chair, canister, table, curtain, door, stove, counter, as though she were taking inventory.

  “She needn't have been so difficult.” Grace might have been talking about a child who'd refused to finish lunch. She circled the table and approached Blanche. As she inched along, she continued to touch items in the room—the same items, Blanche thought, that she'd fingered before. Blanche moved with her so that the distance between them never narrowed. Grace stopped when she came parallel to the sink. “She should have listened, tried to understand how important it was to me to...” Grace's words trailed off as she stared at the sink.

  “To have Mumsfield's money?” Blanche took no care to keep her feelings out of her voice.

  Grace turned scornful eyes on her. “It's not his money. It's my family's money! My great-granddaddy...” She turned toward the sink. “I was her closest relative. Her closest normal relative, at any rate. Just how did she think it would look?” There was fire in her voice. She turned the handles of the hot and cold water taps, tested the water temperature, and fiddled with the knobs until she was satisfied. She picked up the bottle of dishwashing liquid and stared at the print on the back of it. She poured about a teaspoon-fill of the pearly white liquid into her left palm, added some water, and seemed totally absorbed in watching the suds grow thick and creamy between her hands.

  “You killed your aunt when you and Mumsfield went into town to church. That's why you wouldn't let him go into the house, isn't it?”

  “I told him she had a heart attack while I was with her in the cellar. The jackass believed me!” Grace washed the dabs of mud and bits of grass from her arms and hands.

  “You mean your husband?”

  “I really made you believe I loved him, didn't I?” She threw back her head and opened her mouth wide to let out a brash, blaring laugh that startled Blanche. “Oh, he's been useful. Like a veil, a bit of camouflage. But love that fool?” She belted out another brassy laugh.

  “Why'd you marry him if you think he's such a fool?”

  “I told you. He was useful.” Grace reached over and ripped a handful of paper towels from the roll hanging on the wall. “It was cruel of Daddy to leave me money only if I married. He wanted me to have a keeper, someone to...watch me.” She thoroughly dried her hands, then used the towels to brush the dust and twigs from her clothes and shoes.

  “But I found someone who wouldn't...There are more ways to tie a man to you than sex and children.” She examined her hands closely, turning them this way and that, checking the nails, pushing at a cuticle.

  “Like helping him kill his wife?” Blanche took another couple of steps away from Grace.

  “You have been busy.” Grace took a couple of steps toward Blanche.


  “Is that how you tied him to you? By helping him get rid of his wife?” Blanche took a step backward.

  Grace guffawed. “Help him? That's hardly what happened. You've got it wrong.” Grace's voice had the same peeved yet triumphant tone she'd used when she'd first ushered Blanche past the gate into the house in town. “I always hated her, with her whiny voice and all that pretty hair. Always dimpling up to Daddy, stealing my...”

  Blanche remembered what Nate had said about nasty rumors when Grace's young cousin drowned in the pond. She realized that she and Grace were talking about two different victims. Careful, she warned herself. “Your daddy liked your cousin better than you, didn't he?”

  Bright red spots appeared high on Grace's cheeks. “No! No! I was Daddy's favorite, always. He...” She stopped in mid-sentence with the look on her face of someone who'd just waked to find herself in an unfamiliar room.

  Her stillness was chilling. Blanche swallowed hard. “What about your husband? Were you his favorite, too? Or did you have to help him kill his first wife in order to get him?”

  Grace looked startled but didn't speak. She seemed to be listening to or for something. The silence in the room was like gas building toward an explosion.

  “I thought you didn't love him.” Blanche's voice was high and loud to her own ears. “Why did you kill his wife? You could have bought yourself some other man.”

  “Because I hated her! Hated her!” Grace bent her knees and pounded on her thighs with tightly clenched fists. She shouted each word slowly and distinctly. “She was just like...”

  “Your cousin grown up.” Blanche completed Grace's sentence, then recoiled from the woman just as she did from slugs and other slimy creatures. She held her face perfectly still, determined to show nothing of what she felt to this woman who had been mad and murderous even as a child. Keep the bitch talking and bragging, she cautioned herself, and hope Mumsfield and Archibald get their asses here in a hurry! She willed herself to relax. She could play this conversation, push enough of Grace's buttons to keep her fixated on herself, as opposed to what Blanche was sure she'd come for. “If you don't love him, why are you trying to protect him?” she challenged Grace.

  “He wasn't even there!” Grace bellowed at the top of her voice. Flecks of foamy spittle collected in the corners of her mouth. Blanche took two more steps away from her.

  “He didn't even know I'd killed her until after we were married.”

  “So the alibi was really for yourself!”

  Grace poked her chest out a little further. “A master stroke, if I say so myself. He was under suspicion for murdering Jeannette. I knew he would be. I supplied him with a badly needed alibi, thereby proving my undying devotion to him and providing an alibi for myself as well. Of course, he was happy to marry me when he found out about the money. It's the only way Everett can support himself. He didn't get a dime of Jeannette's money. Her family saw to that. I knew they would. By marrying me, he got access to a fresh supply of money. Not just mine, but Aunt Emmeline's as well. Everett needs a lot of money to be happy. We both do. I told him there was enough for both of us.” She rolled her eyes and gave Blanche a conspiratorial look. “And they say it's sex that clouds men's minds!” Grace shook her head and smiled as though Everett and all his money-hungry brothers were just a bunch of devilish little tykes. She ran her hands through her hair in a way that was reminiscent of Everett.

  “Where is he?” Blanche asked again.

  Grace didn't answer immediately. When she did speak, it was not to answer Blanche's question. “A very useful, if greedy, man was Everett...but not a very intelligent man,” she added with a low chuckle. She tucked her blouse more firmly into her waistband and straightened her skirt. “Am I being redundant?” She gave Blanche a cold, speculative look. “Do you know what a redundancy is? I wonder.” Grace grinned a smug, derisive grin.

  Blanche associated Grace's mocking smile with every white person who'd ever ridiculed her for what she was and was not. For a moment, her mouth went sour with the taste of ignorance. She'd look up “redundancy” the first chance she got. If she got a chance. In the meantime, she had no intention of letting Grace know that she had struck a nerve.

  “Where is he?” she pressed.

  “I'll get to that in due time,” Grace told her. “I'm enjoying this. After all, anything I tell you is bound to remain a secret, isn't it?”

  The smile that accompanied this question was as cold as the dead of winter. Its meaning was quite plain and no surprise. I wonder what she thinks I'm going to be doing while she's trying to kill me? Blanche gave Grace a searching look. Grace had no obvious weapon and no place to hide one that Blanche could see. It was possible Grace didn't know which kitchen drawers held knives or other sharp instruments. But I know, Blanche thought. She wore the knowledge that she was a quick movement away from a meat cleaver like armor against Grace.

  “Yes, a redundancy.” Grace picked up the thread of her monologue and told Blanche how she and Everett had drugged Emmeline and left her tied to a cot in the basement. “She was quite comfortable,” Grace added, as if to demonstrate her familial concern. “It was his idea. It began when he found that woman.”

  “You mean the look-alike?”

  Grace affirmed Blanche's question with a flicker of her eyelids.

  “Who is she, anyway?”

  “That's none of your affair.” Grace gave her one of those employer-has-spoken looks to which demure silence was the only correct response.

  “All this shit is my affair. You made sure of that when you killed Nate.”

  Instead of answering Blanche's question, Grace outlined the plan Everett had put to her—drugging Emmeline and replacing her with the look-alike for the signing of the new will, then returning Emmeline to her bed later the same night. “I knew it wouldn't work, of course. I can't imagine how that fool convinced himself that sharp old bitch could actually be convinced she'd slept for a whole day or had forgotten it! But, of course, I had my own plan, and it worked beautifully!” Grace glowed with pride. “I dissolved the pills in her soup and Everett carried her to the basement. Then we closed the house and came down here with that woman.” Grace spoke in a one, two, three, that's-how-you-make-a-good-apple-pie voice that made Blanche queasy.

  Grace was on the move again, pacing the kitchen in even, unhurried steps. Blanche matched her step for step. Grace picked up the salt shaker from the counter. “I found the hypodermic needle in Aunt's room months ago.” She put the salt shaker back on the counter so that it was precisely aligned with the pepper mill. “Dr. Pritchard left it behind. He never came looking for it.” Her voice registered her indignation at the doctor's carelessness.

  “What was in the hypodermic?”

  “Nothing!” Grace straightened a pot holder on its hook until it hung at the same angle as the pot holder on the corresponding hook. “Just air.” She stared at Blanche as though daring her to comment.

  “But didn't your husband suspect something? I mean, first his wife and then your aunt?”

  There needed to be a word other than “smile” to describe the toothy leer on Grace's face. “He was too greedy to suspect anything, too self-serving. He had no more use for her. She'd cut his allowance.” The giggle that curled around Grace's words was almost girlish. “Anyway, I told him I'd loved him since childhood. The same drivel I told you. He believed everything I told him until...”

  Blanche was aware of Grace's continued use of the past tense when she talked about Everett. She was also aware of how easily, and for what flimsy motives, Grace was prepared to kill. “Until what?” she wanted to know. “Where is he?”

  Grace shrugged and tossed her head.

  “Was the sheriff's death what made Everett stop believing you?”

  “You know about the sheriff!” Grace's voice held the kind of surprise a parent shows when a young child does something precocious. “But you'll never guess how!” she laughed and actually paused, to give Blanche an opportunity to try to guess
, which Blanche declined.

  “With the one weapon I knew would work.” She ran her hands slowly down her sides and moved her hips with a sensuousness that surprised Blanche. She didn't think Grace had that much juice in her. Grace's retelling of how she'd convinced the sheriff to drive to Oman's Bluff was much like many other stories Blanche had heard from other women about how they'd made some man pay for walking around with his brain in his penis. Blanche had a few such stories of her own. Her familiarity with the weapon made the murderous account of this privileged, protected, so-called upper-class, and at least superficially uptight woman wielding the world's oldest weapon even more frightening, more chilling.

  “It was as though he'd forgotten everything he knew about me,” Grace told her.

  Yes, Blanche thought, that's always a part of it.

  “I didn't let him know I was in the back seat until we were on the highway. He nearly jumped through the windshield when I popped up behind him. Oh, but that was nothing compared to his reaction when I laid my brassiere on his shoulder! He ran right off the road!” Grace's words were made almost unintelligible by her laughter. “I want to settle our problem in a way I hope you can't refuse, Sheriff,” Grace whispered in a soft voice full of the genteel Georgia accent that was normally only a ghost of a presence in her speech.

  Blanche imagined the sheriff congratulating himself on his good fortune as his brain swelled to full attention in his clammy shorts.