Who Killed the Queen of Clubs?

by Patricia Sprinkle

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t a wreck. She died at home, we heard.” I couldn’t go through the story again. She was sure to hear it on the evening news. “The reason I’m telling you is that Mr. Whelan will need some special attention these next few days.”

  “Of course. Poor thing. It don’t seem fair, does it?” I thought she meant it was unfair for Edie to die before her daddy, but I’d underestimated her single-minded devotion to her patients. “He looked forward to her visits so much.” She sighed. “Of course, people are born to die, ’n’ I oughta be used to it by now, but you don’t ever get what I’d call real used to it. I’ll do what I can to lessen his pain.” She trudged down the hall, her heels rolling out and her pants tight over her ample hips.

  Angels aren’t always thin and beautiful.

  As I headed back to the room, a hoarse cry from Josiah’s room was followed by inarticulate shouts. Ms. O’Connell hurried down the hall on soundless feet, followed by two other members of the staff. She explained to them over one shoulder as they went, “His daughter died, and he’s all tore up about it.”

  I went more slowly and found Josiah surrounded by people far more competent to help him than I. Joe Riddley slumped in his chair, wrung out and grieving at having hurt his friend. I went to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. He covered it with one of his.

  Josiah writhed and moaned on the bed, shaking the side rail with his one good hand, grief ensnared within his damaged body.

  “Get a posy,” Ms. O’Connell ordered. Somebody else left the room at a brisk trot. I couldn’t for the life of me understand how a flower would help, until she returned with a white strait-jacket affair. Quickly they got Josiah into it and restrained him from harming himself.

  Only his eyes moved now, wild and angry. I had the feeling he knew he was trapped in his useless body, understood everything that was happening, and raged at his own helplessness.

  “I’ll bring him a sedative.” Ms. O’Connell hurried out, calm and efficient.

  Joe Riddley bent over to touch Josiah’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry we had to bring you this bad news. We’re leaving now, but I’ll come back later in the week.”

  Josiah tossed his head on the pillow. “Hey,” he said urgently. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said softly, touching his arm.

  He rolled his head from side to side. “Hey! Eh—pee—eh—pee.”

  “Edie?” I hazarded a guess. “You want to know what plans are being made for her? We’ll come back and tell you when we know.”

  His head rolled frantically now. Furious eyes begged us to understand. “Pee. Pee. Pee!”

  “Here.” An aide reached for the urinal and held it over his bed.

  He knocked it from her hand and sent it flying across the room. “Oh! Pee. Hey! Hey!” He grew more and more agitated.

  “Maybe you all ought to leave now and let us get him settled down.” Coming in with a needle, Mary O’Connell spoke pleasantly, but it was more than a suggestion.

  As we started for the door, tears streamed down Josiah’s wrinkled cheeks and pooled in the sunken places where his teeth were gone. “Hey,” he moaned, pleading for us to understand. “Hey. Hey.”

  We could still hear him grieving when we reached the front door.

  13

  If you have been keeping track of the time—which I hadn’t—you will realize we were in serious trouble. When Joe Riddley and I aren’t going to be home for dinner at noon, we let Clarinda know. If we’re running late, we call ahead to say so. By now, we were already three minutes from late, we’d be lucky to get home by one, and I’d let my cell phone battery run down.

  I wanted to pull off the road and call her, but Joe Riddley refused to stop. “We’ll only be a little late,” he assured me. He didn’t have to worry. Clarinda thinks he walks on water.

  As he proceeded at his usual decorous pace while everybody passed us, I remembered that Edie ought to be alive on this gloomy, cold day, and I felt I owed it to her to enjoy it. Eventually, however, questions began to float between me and the view. Who killed her? Why? Was it a stranger, or someone she knew? Was it quick, or did she suffer? Was there one single thing I or Alex or anybody else could have done to prevent this?

  By the time we pulled into our garage, my stomach was tied in knots. I doubted the forthcoming discussion with Clarinda was going to untangle them. As I reached for my door handle, I told Joe Riddley, “You need to know that I’ll probably spend Christmas in the hospital with bleeding ulcers from all this stress.”

  “Ulcers aren’t caused by stress. They’re caused by bacteria or something.” Dr. Yarbrough pushed the button to lower the garage door and headed to the house. That man has no nerves.

  Then I remembered the months after he’d been shot,5 when his nerves were raw, and I winged a prayer of thanks for the way he naturally is: slow, calm, and only occasionally ornery.

  We found Clarinda snoring in Joe Riddley’s recliner with my mother’s afghan over her lap and Lulu dozing on the rug at her feet. When Lulu gave a welcome yip, Clarinda levered the chair to sit up and gave a grunt of utter disgust. “Hunh. I thought that was the sheriff coming to tell me you’d died on the highway.”

  “Were you and Joe Riddley raised by the same mother?” I inquired. “You both constantly expect disaster whenever somebody’s late.” Not to mention Lulu, who was hopping around like I’d returned from the grave—but that’s the nature of beagles.

  “Being around you does that to people.” Clarinda climbed out of the recliner and stomped to the kitchen, surrounded by waves of aggravation. “You can have your dinner, but what isn’t burnt is already cold.” She jerked two plates from the cupboard and served them with scalloped potatoes, slices of baked ham topped with pineapple slices, and green beans. It looked fine to me, but she carried the plates to the dining room and set them down with thumps that shook the table.

  “Mind the crockery,” Joe Riddley said mildly. He hung his cap by the kitchen door and went to wash his hands.

  I looked around for any sign of salad. Having worked for me long enough to read my mind far too often, Clarinda gave a short nod toward the refrigerator. “Got congealed salad. Good thing, too. Lettuce and tomatoes would have rotted, waitin’ for you to get here.”

  “We had a good reason.” I slid the salad from the refrigerator and saw it was one of my favorites, full of grated carrotsand crushed pineapple. Joe Riddley’s not real fond of stuff in his gelatin, so Clarinda only makes it occasionally, for me. The salad hadn’t been cut, either, which meant she hadn’t eaten. No wonder she was cranky. She and I both have a hard time being nice when we’re hungry. She was pouring two glasses of tea like she wished it was poison.

  Feeling bad that we’d been late when she’d gone to extra trouble for me, I said, “I didn’t mean to tell you until after dinner, but we had to go tell Josiah Whelan that Edie died.”

  She whipped her head around. “What happened to her? A car wreck?”

  “You’ve got car wrecks on the brain. Watch out! You’re pouring tea all over the counter.”

  About that time it reached the edge and her stomach, soaking her to the skin. She jumped and clutched her middle, then grabbed a sponge and started mopping the countertop. I cut three squares of salad and set each on a bed of lettuce with a dab of mayonnaise and a maraschino cherry on top. Mama used to fix them like that, but I generally spooned the salad into small bowls. Why was I going to so much trouble? To postpone telling Clarinda about Edie.

  Clarinda finished the countertop and wrung out the sponge like she’d rather be wringing somebody’s neck. She didn’t say a word while she got out the mop and dried the floor, but then she propped her backside against the lower cabinets, folded her arms over her sizeable chest, and glowered. “It’s something bad, ain’t it? Something you oughta called and tole me.”

  I turned too fast, annoyed with her and the rest of the world. My elbow caught the cherries and sent them flying. When the jar hit the floor, it
shattered. I would never have believed one little jar could hold so much juice. It splashed all over everything in sight, including me.

  Clarinda howled. “All over my kitchen. An’ I give it a good cleaning just this morning.”

  I grabbed Lulu and carried her out to the backyard, which we’d recently fenced. She complained about staying in the cold, but she’d gotten shot the same night Joe Riddley did, and a three-legged beagle has enough problems without glass in her paws.

  Clarinda was still glaring at the floor and the juice-speckled lower cabinets. I grabbed a paper towel and dabbed my shoes, stockings, and the hem of my best beige pants—which now had pink polka dots and, possibly, chocolate cake on the seat. Then I took her arm and steered her toward the living room. “Let’s leave this mess a minute. It’s not going anywhere, and neither of us is gonna be good for anything until we talk.”

  She headed to a chair and I sank to the couch. “Edie was murdered sometime last night.”

  “Murdered? How? By who? How come you didn’t call me as soon as you found out?” Her forehead was a field of furrows. Her lower lip jutted out like a shelf.

  “We don’t know who did it. The police are investigating.”

  “The po-lice? You mean the sheriff. Whelans live out beyond the city limits.” Clarinda knows law enforcement procedures as well as we do. Maybe better.

  I explained about the wreck near the interstate, then added, “Isaac James asked us to go tell Edie’s boss and Josiah. I’m sorry I didn’t call here, but my cell phone battery is dead.”

  Clarinda rocked back and forth, holding her face in her hands and moaning, “Jesus, oh, Jesus. Poor Miss Edie. And poor Daisy, too. This will like to kill her.”

  Something floated to the surface of my memory. “Aren’t you related to Henry’s mama?”

  “Daisy’s mama’s daddy was my mama’s first cousin.” That made Daisy something like Clarinda’s first cousin thrice removed, but you’d have thought Daisy was her sister, the way she propped her hands on her lap, leaned forward with a gimlet stare, and demanded, “You’re not fixing to tell me Daisy and Henry got anything to do with this, are you?”

  “Probably not,” I hedged, “but Isaac found a machete that may be the murder weapon, and I saw Henry making a machete last week.”

  She gave one of her “that don’t mean a thing” grunts. “Sure he makes machetes. Henry can make anything. But he’d never kill Miss Edie. What cause would he have? The Joyners been working for Whelans since Elijah took off in the heavenly chariot. Some folks say—but never mind that. Just keep in mind that Henry gave up a good job to stay and work the harvest after Mr. Josiah’s stroke. He’d have no cause to kill Miss Edie, if he was the killin’ kind—which he ain’t. Henry’s sweet, underneath that thick skin he developed married to That Woman.” I could see capitals as she spoke the last two words.

  She frowned, but it was her thinking frown, not the you-better-watch-out one. “Wonder what’ll happen to the grove now? I sure hope poor Henry hasn’t lost himself a job.”

  “My guess is, it still belongs to Josiah, but I don’t know who’ll administer it for him.”

  She leaned on her hands again and heaved herself to her feet. “You was busy. I can see that.” It was the closest she would ever come to forgiveness. “But you oughta told somebody to call tell me. What if somebody had called axin’ about the murder, ’cause I work for the judge, and I don’t know a thing? You be thinking about that next time.”

  “I hope there won’t be a next time.” I went to wash my hands, wishing I could wash the day’s events down the drain.

  14

  That awful day wasn’t over yet.

  Cindy dragged herself into my office sometime after four, looking like she was trudging through thick, wet mud and about to fall facedown in it. Her makeup hadn’t been renewed for hours, and when she took off her long jacket, I saw that her tan jeans were wrinkled and her brown cardigan was crooked over a pale yellow turtleneck. I’d never seen my elegant daughter-in-law so rumpled.

  I’d also never seen her look so weary. She slouched as she crossed the office and sank into the wing chair. Cindy never slouched. Her posture was one of the things I’d admired about her in the years before I started liking her.

  I turned gladly from the computer, where I’d been pretending to work on inventory. We still had too many poinsettias. Too much of everything, since that blasted superstore opened. “Have you been over at Genna’s all day?”

  She nodded as if that simple act took too much energy. I was touched that she’d chosen to creep into my office to recover. “You were real sweet to stay with her.”

  She massaged her temples with both hands, then shoved back her hair, which was so well cut it was still sleek as mink. “I ought to get home. The kids are with friends, but they’ve probably got homework, and I should—” Her voice trembled. “But I can’t. I can’t!” She pitched forward onto her knees, taking great gasping breaths.

  I touched her gently on the top of that shining hair, stuck tissues in her hand, and headed for two mugs of coffee to let her grieve in peace. When I got back, she was sitting upright in the chair again, but with her nose red and her eyes wet, she looked a lot younger than thirty-five.

  She smiled when I handed her one of the steaming mugs. “Thanks. I’m frozen.” She took a long, grateful sip and exhaled stress in a sigh.

  “You are plumb worn out, honey. You didn’t need to stay over there all this time.” I took a swallow of coffee myself, enjoying the warmth running down my throat. I was wearing an extra cardigan I keep at work, and I still hadn’t felt warm enough all day.

  She took another sip, followed it with another sigh. “There wasn’t anybody else, not even Olive. She was over in Augusta today doing something about a couch and didn’t hear about Edie until the twelve o’clock news, coming home.”

  Cindy stretched out her legs and slid down on her tail-bone. “I thought I could leave when she finally got there, but she talked on and on about some trouble she was having with her decorator, until Genna sent her home. Genna said after she left that it’s bad enough that Olive expects Adney to help her pay for all the expensive stuff she wants, without having to listen to her complain about it. She—Genna, I mean—begged me to stay with her until Adney got home from Birmingham.” The way she sighed, I got the feeling Cindy had been a reluctant Samaritan. “It took ages to find him, then hours for him to get here.” She shoved back her hair again and massaged her scalp with long fingers.

  “Find him? Doesn’t he have a cell phone?”

  “He woke up late and forgot to turn it on. Genna finally called his boss to see which hospital he was visiting first. By then he was in a meeting, and she got one of those women who exist to make other people’s lives difficult. You know the kind? Said she couldn’t possibly bother Adney, but she’d give him a message when the meeting was done.”

  “That’s not just women, honey, it’s the tyranny of petty power. If you give some people even a little power, they feel entitled to club folks with it every chance they get.” There was that word “entitled” again. I hadn’t used it for years, and now it kept cropping up.

  Cindy was going wearily on with the story. “Well, that woman at the hospital nearly made Genna crazy. Wouldn’t call Adney. Wouldn’t even listen to what Genna was trying to tell her. Of course, Genna was crying so hard by then, she wasn’t easy to understand. I finally grabbed the phone and said, ‘We have a crisis here and we need Adney Harrison right this minute. If you can’t arrange to put him on the line, Judge Yarbrough will call your sheriff.’ ” Cindy laughed, and I was glad to see her finally relaxing. “She had Adney on the phone in one minute flat.”

  “Good for you, honey.” I didn’t bother to point out I have no authority in Alabama. I was honored to have figured so prominently in her plans.

  “Maybe,” she said dubiously. Now that the deed was done, I suspected her Southern mama’s credo, Be sweet, now, was dumping dollops of guilt on her co
nscience.

  She repeated her sip-and-sigh routine—sort of like a “breathe in the good air, breathe out the bad air” therapy, with the addition of sugar and caffeine. I sipped my own coffee and waited for her to go on. She obviously needed to talk.

  “Adney didn’t help much when he did come to the phone. His first words to Genna were, ‘Honey, I’ve told you not to bother me when I’m with a client.’ She started apologizing, then blubbering, so I took the phone again to explain what had happened. Adney was real sorry then, of course. He said she’s always calling him with little things that have gone wrong in the house, and he figured she’d overdrawn their bank account or dented her car. He said he’d go check out of the motel right away, but it was already ten, so he couldn’t get get here until four. I left as soon as he arrived, and as terrible as it sounds, I was never so glad to leave a place in my life.”

  She set her empty mug on the floor with a thunk. “Bless her heart, Genna is helpless without him. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to eat or not, couldn’t think of anybody she wanted to call to tell about Edie, and she sure couldn’t handle the police. They have hounded her to death, asking the same questions over and over. Did Edie have any enemies? Had she mentioned being frightened of anybody? Genna told them about Valerie and Frank—how she and Olive think they were playing tricks to worry Edie—and the officers said they’d look into that, but then they started asking again where Genna was last night, and if she could prove it. How can you prove you were alone and asleep?” Cindy’s voice rose in indignation. “I told her to call Shep and refuse to say a word until he got there, but Genna said Adney would call him on his way home. I think Shep is coming over a little later today.”

  Cindy shifted uneasily in her chair. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but Genna is worried that Edie may have left some of her money to Valerie. Genna knows Edie talked to Shep last week. If Edie did something dumb like that, could Genna contest the will?”