Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery

by Barbara Neely

  “Is Aunt Emmeline dead, Blanche?” Mumsfield's voice was low and exceedingly calm. Blanche wondered what it was costing him to keep it that way. She'd hoped to avoid this. She'd hoped Archibald would be the one to break the news.

  “Is she, Blanche? Please tell me. I trust you, Blanche.”

  “Yes, baby. She's dead.” Blanche looked into his face and saw new lines. It was no longer a boy's face. He lowered his head as he began to sob. When he was calm enough, he wiped his face and surprised her by asking for details of his aunt's death.

  Blanche gave him a simplified version of what Grace had told her—how she and Everett had set out to get control of Emmeline's money by having someone sign her name to a new will, a will everyone approved of and, therefore, no one would question, a will that made Grace and Everett Mumsfield's financial guardians and put Emmeline's money under their control. She didn't add what she suspected Grace had planned for him.

  “I don't know who that other woman was, exactly, but I'm sure she's kin to you,” she responded to Mumsfield's question. She couldn't bring herself to mention Emmeline's being tied to a cot, or the air bubble Grace had injected into his probably struggling aunt. “Your cousins locked your Aunt Emmeline in the basement and she died there,” she told him. This was the second time in less than an hour that she'd gone out of her way to protect him.

  FOURTEEN

  Archibald came directly to the kitchen when he returned. He found Blanche and Mumsfield still sitting at the table sipping lemonade. A slight tremor shook Archibald's hand as he reached for a kitchen chair. He leaned heavily, wearily, on the back of the chair before slowly seating himself. He tried to form a smile for Mumsfield, but his lips failed in their attempt to turn upward and his eyes were too bewildered to participate. After a few moments, he asked Mumsfield to please leave the room so that he could talk privately with Blanche. Blanche noted Mumsfield's struggle to defy Archibald. In the end, he lost. “You won't leave, will you, Blanche?” he asked before stepping out the back door.

  “No one's leaving this house. You can be sure of that,” Archibald cut in before Blanche could speak. He took an immaculate handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed at his brow. “I simply can't believe it. Poor Cousin Emmeline. To die like that!”

  But his grief wasn't such that he couldn't attend to the necessary details. He made Blanche repeat everything she'd already told him about what Everett and Grace had done—with his unwitting help. He had the good grace to blush during the telling of that part of the story.

  “Who is she, anyway?” Blanche asked him, referring to Emmeline's imposter.

  Archibald bristled. “I don't believe...at is to say, I'm not at liberty to discuss family...”

  “Look,” Blanche interrupted, “I could have been killed by a member of this family. I got a right to know!”

  Archibald relented. “I'd never seen her before that night I mistook her for Cousin Emmeline. Of course, I didn't realize... I'd heard of her...Family gossip...really remarkable resemblance. She would have fooled anyone who knew Emmeline. Anyone. And she seemed ill. I'm very susceptible to germs, and my eyes... I'm not attempting to exonerate myself, but...” He took his glassesfrom his breast pocket, polished them, and set them gently on his nose. “I should wear them all the time.” He blinked at Blanche, who said nothing. She folded her arms and prepared to repeather question, but he went on without prodding.

  “She's the daughter of Great-uncle Robert, Cousin Emmeline's father. Her mother was their house maid. They say that as a child she looked so much like Aunt Emmeline—who looked exactly like her daddy—that Aunt Clarissa, who was Aunt Emmeline's mother, made Great-uncle Robert get mother and child out of the county. She married a local sharecropper. I don't recall hearing what happened to her after that. I think the child's name was Lucille or Lucinda, or something of that sort.” Archibald's lips formed a straight, taut line, like a pale, thin, tightly interlocked zipper he had no intention of opening again on this matter.

  “Look,” Blanche told him, “I want to know what all this business is about. I could have gone to the police. By now it might be spread all over the newspapers.”

  Blanche hadn't expected Archibald to take kindly to her tone or the content of her message. His sharp intake of breath and the rising color in his cheeks confirmed her perception. She turned from Archibald toward the kitchen door.

  “Where is Aunt Emmeline?” Mumsfield closed the door firmly behind him and looked from Blanche to Archibald and back at Blanche.

  Blanche had been so concentrated on Archibald and what she wanted and needed to know from him that she'd literally forgotten Mumsfield was outside. She wondered if he'd been listening at the window. Archibald cleared his throat in what Blanche suspected was a play for time. “Brace yourself, my boy,” he began.

  “I know she's dead. I know that,” Mumsfield interrupted. There was an impatience in his voice Blanche had never heard before. “Did you take her out of the cellar?” He didn't bother to wipe at his tears. “She shouldn't be down there. She...”

  “Her body has been seen to. Been taken to.. .” Archibald sank deeper into his chair. “It's so hard to take in, to understand...” He shook his head like a man who'd just been punched.

  Blanche understood Archibald's shock, but she was much more interested in Mumsfield. She hated the way misery and pain seemed to make people stronger in ways that good fortune rarely appeared to do, but she was glad for Mumsfield's sake. No matter how all of this turned out, she was sure he'd survive. Mumsfield caught her eye and gave her a grave half-smile.

  “Now tell us the rest,” she said, turning to Archibald. “Tell us about Grace.” Archibald looked at Mumsfield. Blanche could see that he wanted to tell Mumsfield to leave the room again. But anyone looking at Mumsfield could see that would be of no use. Mumsfield sat down and reached for Blanche's hand across the table.

  “There was always talk in the family,” Archibald began. “Since she was a child...a cat mangled, the drowning of our cousin Lorisa in the pond out front, accidents to the servants' children.” He looked like a man poring over photos of the past, trying to understand their relationship to one another. “But her parents and grandparents would hear nothing against her. Said she was high-strung, artistic. When she took up with Everett there was no one to stop her. Her parents were both dead. She was an only child. The fact that Everett was already married...” Archibald shrugged. “At any rate, they married, and...”

  “What about Everett's first wife?” Mumsfield's grip on Blanche's hand became nearly crippling. She grimaced in pain.

  “How do you know about these things?” Archibald looked as though he suspected her of having supernatural powers.

  “Anyone could see she wasn't sane.” Blanche stretched the truth just a bit. “And it's a small county,” she added with a smile. “There ain't a lot of secrets.”

  “Why did she, Blanche? Why?” Mumsfield demanded to know.

  “Because she's sick, Mumsfield, honey. In her mind. Very sick,” she told him without hesitation. Mumsfield's grip loosened a bit.

  Blanche was aware of Archibald's attentiveness to her response to Mumsfield. She felt the older man relax. She understood the relief he must have felt that Mumsfield's question was directed at her instead of himself. She also realized that the lack of hostility she saw on Archibald's face when she now looked fully at him was related to more than her answer to Mumsfield's question.

  She and Archibald were going through a very speededup version of the de-jackassing process. While he might have defended blacks in court, it didn't mean he considered her his equal, any more than her employers did generally. Usually it took three to five cleaning sessions for a new employer of the racist jackass variety to stop speaking to her in loud, simple sentences. It took an additional fifteen to fifty substantive contacts before she was acknowledged as a bona fide member of the human race. Now here was Archibald already past the testing-your-intelligence phase, being mindful and grateful that s
he'd been smart enough and quick enough to help him out of a difficult situation with Mumsfield, one he clearly hadn't been prepared to handle. It gave Blanche an idea.

  A burly, red-faced man knocked on the back door and asked for Archibald. Blanche went to fetch him and listened from behind the door while the man told Archibald that “the boys” had searched all the obvious places, like the quarry and the woods, but had found no trace of anything unusual—otherwise known as Everett, Blanche thought. Archibald told the man to bring the boys back in the morning and cautioned them to speak to no one.

  When Archibald returned to the kitchen, Blanche was at the kitchen table with her head resting on her arms. The day had lasted too long and the numbness that had protected her from the shock of having her life threatened by a madwoman was wearing off.

  “I believe there's just a bit more business to which we need attend, and then you can rest.” Archibald spoke gently but firmly, as though he had some inkling that he wasn't going to have her attention much longer.

  Despite her shock and fatigue, Blanche was quite attentive to Archibald's long, drawn-out speech about how grateful the family was for her good sense in contacting him instead of the authorities. As if he isn't one of them, she thought. He worked his way up to hoping she'd stay on as housekeeper and companion to Mumsfield at a salary that made her eyes sparkle. Blanche thanked him for the job offer and launched into the story of how she had come to be in the house.

  Archibald looked shocked and then amused by Blanche's story. Apparently, the local justice system was not an object of his respect, either. He assured her that he could and would straighten out her difficulties first thing in the morning and once again offered her a job. Blanche rose from the table and walked to the window, where her Nate rock sat on its paper towel. She reached out and touched it, letting her fingers feel its cool, rough texture. She could hear Nate's sharp, dry voice reminding her of the number of chances for security a woman like her was likely to get in life.

  “I got kids,” she told Archibald. “They need health insurance and good schooling. And I want a ten-year contract. In writing. And a pension plan.” Archibald merely nodded.

  But still she couldn't agree. “Please, Blanche,” Mumsfield said.

  Blanche stared at Nate's rock and remembered how she'd gotten it. She thought how comfortable, how simple and safe her life could be working for Mumsfield—summer days of bird song and country peace, her kids digging in Nate's garden. But it was Nate's garden. He was supposed to be scooping up handfuls of loamy soil, filling his nose with its rich aroma, caking his fingernails with it while the sun crisped the back of his neck.

  If Lucille showed up, she'd be paid off also, as would Everett—if he was alive. If he was dead, some convenient accident would be invented to explain his death, too. But what about Grace? What happened when she was let out, or the wily bitch escaped?

  Blanche spun around and looked from one to the other of the two white men waiting for her to make up her mind to serve them, to preserve their secrets and their way of life by throwing herself like a big black blanket over what had happened here. But what about Nate? And even the sheriff? Wasn't somebody supposed to do something about their deaths beside cart the killer off to a cushy asylum and hire a housekeeper with hush money?

  “Please, Blanche,” Mumsfield repeated.

  Blanche picked up her Nate rock and cradled it in both hands. “Let me think about it, Mumsfield, honey. Let me think about it.” She tucked the rock in her pocket and went off to bed.

  EPILOGUE

  Blanche told everyone she needed a breather, so she was going to visit some friends in South Carolina. It wasn't true, of course. She was on her way to Boston to stay with Cousin Charlotte. She also hadn't told folks that she never expected to return to Farleigh, not even to get her kids. Ardell would bring Taifa and Malik to her when the time came. She hadn't told folks the whole truth because she thought it was best for her to be in a state of plans-and-whereabouts-unknown.

  She'd be in Boston by the time the story broke in the Atlanta Constitution. The reporter had assured her that her name would not be mentioned, but Archibald would know. What would Archibald think when he realized he'd paid her all that money and she'd hardly gotten out the door before she was asking around for a reporter a person could halfway trust? Of course, she hadn't promised to keep her mouth shut, and she wasn't responsible for Archibald's assumptions. Aggravation pay, not hush money. She'd known all along that she could not keep quiet.

  Her major goal had been to make sure that everyone around knew just how crazy Grace was, as a way of ensuring that she stayed locked up, for Nate's sake. It wasn't much, and it might not work, but it was all that she could think to do that would not land her in jail. She wondered whether Lucille would surface when it all came out. Archibald's boys had never been able to find Lucille, but Miz Minnie knew where she was. Miz Minnie had also found out, from the woman hired to look after Mumsfield, that Grace had tried to kill Everett with her favorite wrench. He'd managed to throw her out of the car but had been knocked out when the car swerved into a ravine. After Grace had left him for dead in the car, he'd managed to get the car out of the ravine and hightail it to Atlanta in a panic. He'd since collected his clothes and whatever else he could get. Archibald had refused to give him any money, and Mumsfield had refused to see him or allow him to spend the night in the house. Everett had taken off for no one knew where. Blanche didn't mind that he'd gotten away. He was broke, prison enough for him, and he hadn't hurt anyone she cared about. Except Mumsfield, she added as an afterthought. She understood that his Down's syndrome made him as recognizably different from the people who ran and owned the world as she. It was this similarity that made him visible to her inner eye and eligible for her concern.

  Their parting had been very sad. There was no way she could explain how the last six days had confirmed her constitutional distaste for being any white man's mammy, no matter what she thought of the man in question, or how many fancy titles and big salaries were put on the job. But while their parting was very sad, it was different from what she'd expected. She'd braced herself for his tears and pleading, his pitiful need for her. There had been tears in his eyes, but they'd stayed unshed. He'd neither pleaded nor looked pitiful.

  “I understand, Blanche,” he'd told her. “I understand.” And for two seconds she'd thought that somehow he'd leaped across the gap between them and truly knew what it meant to be a black woman trying to control her own life and stand firm against having her brain vanillaed. She knew that she would think of him often, wonder what had become of him, how he'd aged. But she hoped never to see him or anyone connected to his family again.

  Outside the bus window, trees and fields and farmhouses rushed by, as though running away from the skyscrapers, subways, and nightclubs she was moving toward. She'd thought about flying up to Boston but decided to use every nickel of the money Archibald had given her for Malik and Taifa's education.

  She leaned back in her seat. She felt battered, as though the last six days had been one long fist fight that she hadn't exactly lost, but in which she'd been knocked about so badly that the way she saw and thought about things had been forever altered, although she couldn't yet put her finger on exactly how. She did know that while once she would have looked forward to city life, she was now approaching Boston as yet another enemy territory. It seemed that enemy territory was all there was in this country for someone who looked like her. She had nowhere else to go—at least to make a living—except among those who disdained her to death.

  She knew she would step lightly again, dance, joke, laugh. She would always be a woman who'd come too close to murder, who knew what it meant to actually fear for her life. But, of course, that wasn't all of it. She smiled again at the memory of Grace lying unconscious at her feet. She would also always be a woman who'd fought for her life and won. That woman, no matter how much she'd changed, was still capable of negotiating enemy territory—even without a reference
from her most recent employer.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Blanche has had more mamas and midwives than a small nation, and I thank each and every one of them, most especially Jeremiah Cotton for his unflagging support, Kate White for her tireless editing, Helen Crowell for explaining Mosaicism to me, as well as Maxine Alexander, Taifa Bartz, Babs Bigham, Donna Bivens, Dick Cluster, Shelley Evans, Roz Feldberg, Charlene Gilbert, Lucy Marx, Ann, Vanessa, and Bryan Neely, and Barbara Taylor for their careful reading and invaluable comments.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Barbara Neely's short fiction has appeared in various anthologies, including Breaking Ice, Things That Divide Us, Angels of Power, Speaking for Ourselves, and Test Tube Women. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachussetts, where she is working on the next Blanche White mystery.