Linette already had glasses of iced tea dressed with wedges of lemon sitting on silver coasters on mahogany tables in the living room. I moseyed behind Wilma into the world of high ceilings, carved woodwork, heart-pine floors covered with ancient Oriental rugs, silver and china on each available surface, and pressed-brass valances above dark green brocade drapery. An antebellum Chickering piano sat in one corner of the living room, adorned with family portraits in silver frames: Wilma’s parents’ wedding picture, a family picture taken when Wilma was about three, and a studio portrait of Mr. Billy, her dad, when he must have been about sixty-five. An oil painting of Granddaddy Will hung over the fireplace. He looked genial and satisfied with the house he’d created. The upholstered chair in the painting still sat beside a marble-topped table near the window, and the upholstery looked the same. Two old sofas, stiff and hard, faced each other near the fireplace.
Bookshelves built on each side of the fireplace held only leather-bound books. Wilma kept her modern hardcover or paperback books with bright covers in a sitting room-cumoffice at the back of the house, where they wouldn’t sully Granddaddy Will’s library.
The liveliest thing in the living room were rainbows that jiggled on the stark white walls as sunbeams touched crystal prisms in the dining room chandelier next door.
Our Georgia sun can be hard on fabrics. I saw that some of the upholstery was worn on the chairs near the window, and Wilma’s drapery and wallpaper had begun to fade, but she would never replace them until she could match exactly what had been there a hundred years before. It might cost her a pretty penny, but she would never think of running up to Augusta for something she liked, like the rest of us — and, probably, like the ancestress whose taste she now so slavishly followed.
She took the sofa on one side of the fireplace and nodded for me to take the one across from her. The slick seat was infernally uncomfortable, hard as a brick, and too high for me to reach the floor. Wilma valued seats more for which of her ancestors had sat on them than for the comfort they provided. I resisted an impulse to tuck my feet under me and reached for my tea.
Wilma sipped, set down her glass, and finally said what I’d expected to hear when I first arrived. “Oh, MacLaren, you are so sweet to come. Can you believe what’s happened?” That was as far as she got before the composure she had found in the garden crumbled. She pulled out her wisp of a handkerchief and watered it thoroughly. When she could speak again, she wailed, “I don’t know how I’m going to get on without Willena. I always thought I’d go first.”
With her nose red and her eyes pink, her resemblance to a weasel was pronounced. I hoped Prince Charming didn’t come riding up the drive that afternoon.
I pulled the two tissues I still had left after Nancy’s crying jag out of my clutch and offered them, but Wilma waved them away. “Would you ask Linette to run up and get me a fresh hankie, please?”
Marveling that a woman could live in this day and age without fetching her own handkerchiefs, I wended my way to the kitchen. At least old Will hadn’t insisted on a kitchen out behind the house, like plantations used to have, with enough space between house and kitchen for grass to grow. Wilma’s kitchen was at the back of the house, largely unchanged since Wilma’s daddy had remodeled it in the early fifties. I had accompanied my mama to a Garden Club meeting there as a young teen and remembered Mr. Billy taking us all back to show us what he called, proudly, “the Cadillac of kitchens.” The cabinets were white enameled steel topped with stainless steel, the stove and sink both built into the countertop. The stove must have been a good one, for it was still in use.
The floor was both modern and historically accurate, for Mr. Billy’s black-and-white linoleum squares had been pulled up and the heart pine floor refinished to a glossy glow.
Linette stood at an oak table in the center of the room, polishing Wilma’s silver punch bowl. Silver trays and the ladle waited their turn, glinting in a ray of morning sun. The table was mighty low for somebody as tall as Linette to work at. Her back must ache at night.
A second maid in uniform stood at the sink contemplating two plastic gallon jugs of pale yellow liquid. As I came in she was asking Linette in a scandalized voice, “You want me to pour all that good juice and stuff down the sink?”
When Linette saw me, she asked, “Yes, ma’am?” instead of answering her companion.
“Wilma needs a fresh handkerchief,” I told her. Seeing something glitter like silver through the window, I moseyed over to peer down a long grassy alley between two rows of Spanish oaks. “What a lovely vista. Is that the river down there?” I hadn’t realized that Wilma lived so close to one of the coils of the little river that snakes through our county on its way to the Ogeechee and the sea.
“Yes, ma’am.” Linette sounded as proud as if it were her own home. “I keep tellin’ Miss Wilma that the best view in the house is from the kitchen.”
“An’ I keep tellin’ you she shouldn’t be cuttin’ that mistletoe now. She could make a fortune selling it come Christmas,” muttered the young woman at the sink.
We don’t have Spanish moss this far inland, but many of our big trees are blessed with a bumper crop of mistletoe. The parasite is harvested each winter for Christmas sales.
Linette huffed. “She don’t need the money, so she can cut it when she wants to. It’s pesky stuff, mistletoe.” She cast a worried look toward the window. “But Lincoln is too old to be up there cutting it down. She’s had him at it all this past week.”
I looked again and noticed a ladder propped up against one of the far trees. The branches gave an occasional quiver that couldn’t be the wind.
I wouldn’t be cutting it at all if it were mine. I know it’s not good for trees, but they live for decades with it in their branches, and it adds a nice touch of green to the landscape in winter.
Bless her heart, I wondered whether Wilma had ever been kissed beneath the mistletoe.
Then I remembered I was here on an errand of mercy. “Handkerchiefs. Wilma needs a fresh one,” I reminded Linette.
She jerked her head toward the door. “They’re in the top drawer of her dresser. Shateika, run up and fetch one.”
“I’ll get it,” I offered. “You all look busy.” The way pots were bubbling on the stove, preparations for dinner were under way, and my casserole was wholly superfluous.
Linette hesitated, then nodded. “Front room on the right, up the stairs. The handkerchiefs are in the left-hand drawer. If you can’t find them, ask Jackie. She’s up there vacuuming.”
I nodded toward the punch bowl, ladle, and trays. “When did Wilma get those back?”
Linette gave the bowl one more wipe and reached for a tarnish-proof bag. “This mornin’. She tole me to call the police and ax them to bring her things. She didn’t want them lying around the community center kitchen with folks tromping in and out. The chief himself brung them right before you got here.”
Given that Willena had been killed far down the hall and that her murder probably had no bearing on Wilma’s family silver, it made sense that the silver should have been returned already. On the other hand, from the expression of the second maid, she knew as well as I did that if it had been one of the rest of us who had left something in a building where a crime was committed, we’d have had to wait until the investigation was complete before retrieving our belongings. America may be a classless society, but like somebody said, some are more equal than others.
“We had a real tragedy that night,” I allowed, propping myself against the doorjamb. “I know you’ve been a comfort to Wilma.”
Linette pressed her lips together. “I wish I had been here when Miss Wilma got home. Miss MayBelle put her to bed and stayed until we got back, but she’s not what I’d call a comforting sort.”
“Not really,” I agreed, mentally adding, Not unless you prefer to be comforted by reptiles.
“We wouldn’t have gone down to Dublin that night,” Linette continued, applying polish to the ladle, “but Mi
ss Wilma insisted. She told me it had been too long since we saw our Leroy. He’s got a new baby, you know. So she said she could handle things at the meeting. I wish I’d gone with her. I surely do. If I’d known . . .”
Linette sounded like she was settling in for a long chat, but Wilma needed that handkerchief, so I brought things to a close. “She’s lucky to have you,” I assured her. “You take good care of her, now.”
“I will.” Linette spoke in a docile voice to me, but her tone sharpened as she instructed the woman by the sink, “Go ahead and pour it out. I mixed that pineapple juice with real cream and other things. It’s probably sour by now, and if it isn’t, Miss Wilma ain’t never gonna drink it. It would remind her of what happened.”
“We could at least taste it,” Shateika grumbled. But she reached for one jug and began to unscrew the lid. I went upstairs to the glug-glug of a gallon jug emptying into the sink.
I had attended meetings at Wilma’s, but had never been upstairs. Oil paintings of Kenans in heavy gilt frames lined the stairwell. All of them wore sleek, satisfied looks. The men were subdued, but the women were peacocks in diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. At the far back of the upstairs hall, lit by a small picture light like a household shrine, stood Granddaddy Will with a lady I presumed was his wife. I couldn’t remember her name, but I remembered those diamond-and-emerald dangling earrings. They were the ones Willena wore the night she died. I wondered where they were now, and what happened to the matching brooch shown in the painting on the breast of a green velvet dress. The brooch was a gold square with a diamond in each corner and three matched emeralds in the center. Nobody would wear a brooch like that nowadays, so I guessed it lay in some jewelry box here upstairs, immortal and unworn.
In a dim corner of the hall I spotted a picture I found far more charming than ancestors in oil. It was a sepia photo of a large family sitting on the front porch of an unpainted farmhouse while two black servants (slaves?) and a mule stood nearby in the yard. I wondered if one of the boys on the front steps, barefoot and in short pants, was Granddaddy Will. Probably. What else would cause Wilma to keep that humble picture among her grand ones?
Wilma’s bedroom was surprising. Given the rest of her house, I expected a decor frozen around 1890. Instead, I found green wall-to-wall carpet and gold-and-white French provincial furniture that had been in style back when Wilma was a teenager. My guess was that it had been redone then and never since. Pink roses ran rampant on the wallpaper, comforter, and the canopy over the queen-sized bed, while the bed itself sported such a mound of lace-edged white pillows that I wondered how long it took the maid to remove them each night. Did a raging romantic still live underneath Wilma’s frozen historical façade? Was that why she was still awaiting Prince Charming?
More silver frames gleamed from the mantelpiece, so I crossed a carpet as thick and green as grass to check them out. Wilma smiled at me from every frame. Fat pigtails on both shoulders, she grinned a gap-toothed smile from astride a glossy brown pony. At around ten she sat on the couch carefully holding a fat baby who must be Willena. At fifteen she held aloft a cake she had baked and won a prize for in home economics class. That picture, I remembered, had been in the paper, as had the next one: Wilma at eighteen in a cloud of white tulle, holding her father’s arm at her presentation ball. Her pointy little face looked so hopeful back then, when she had confidence her prince would soon arrive.
Mr. Billy had certainly been no prince. Little, crabby, and sharp-tongued, he couldn’t have been pleasant to live with, particularly when he got old and suffered greatly from what they called “sugar di-beetees” back then. Wilma had cared for him faithfully, overseeing his diet and even giving him his shots on the nurse’s night off. Maybe I ought to exercise some compassion in her direction. After all, while I couldn’t imagine putting pictures of myself in my bedroom, I had pictures of children and grandchildren to scatter around.
Poor little rich woman, with nobody to love her.
14
I went back down to Wilma and gave her three handkerchiefs. While I was gone, Linette had refreshed my glass of tea, so I sat again, sipped tea, and chatted a few minutes longer. Eventually I managed to ask whether Wilma remembered where people were sitting during the first half of the meeting and where the little boxed gift set was during the break.
She shook her head. “I was thinking about refreshments.” She gave a watery little sniff and dabbed her nose with a fresh pink handkerchief. “I couldn’t tell you where anybody was sitting if my life depended on it.” She stopped, then added in a voice of spite, “Except for MayBelle, of course. She was at the back, with Sadie Lowe.”
That was interesting. MayBelle had been sitting on the front row after the break, but she was still standing when I first came into the room. She had come over to welcome me, then had honed right in on Grover as he arrived. Gusta had ordered Cindy and me to come sit with her and Meriwether in the third row about that time, so I hadn’t noticed where MayBelle sat.
“I thought Willena was going to love her present.” Wilma’s voice quavered. “I spent seven hundred dollars on that set, Mac, and you know good and well they won’t take it back now, with a missing corkscrew.”
No, I didn’t think they would. Who but Wilma would even entertain that notion?
“But you didn’t see who had it last before the break?”
She shook her head. “I was thinking about refreshments,” she repeated.
That reminded me of something else I wanted to ask her. “What did Willena eat that evening, do you remember? Some people said she was sick in the ladies’ room.”
Wilma bridled. “It certainly wasn’t my food. She left before I served refreshments.”
Of course she had. Why hadn’t I remembered that? I was so embarrassed, I wanted to crawl out the door, but the notion of a trial — with Cindy in the defendant’s seat — spurred me on. “I don’t suppose you have any idea how the front door got unlocked, do you?”
She looked startled. “The door was unlocked?” She pressed one hand to her heart. “I remember now. The chief told us. I guess that explains how he got in.”
Now I was the startled one. “Who?”
“The dreadful man who did this thing. I have racked my brain all week, wondering when he got in. I figured he had to have come in early that morning while Dexter was carrying out the trash, and hidden in the building all day long.”
I tried to think how to ask the next question. “So you don’t think any of us could have done it?”
“Oh, no!” Wilma compressed her mouth into a sad little bow. She got up, drifted over to the window, and stood with her back to me, one hand on the drape. Her shoulders slumped. Finally she said in a choked voice, “I mean, several people might have thought it, but they never meant it. I’ve said myself, ‘I’m going to kill her!’ when she volunteered for something and then put off what needed to be done until I had to help her with it. Willena could be lazy, you know, and difficult when she wanted her own way. But I am going to miss her so much.” She raised the pink handkerchief to her eyes, then turned with a bewildered frown. “You know what’s silly? I’m almost as angry with her for dying as I am with whoever killed her. I keep thinking that if she hadn’t spent so much time in that bathroom . . . She could have come out with MayBelle, or Meriwether. But it always did take her half an hour to fix her face.” She sniffed and blinked back tears, then turned to stare out the window again.
“Anger is a natural part of grief,” I assured her.
I was about to get up and leave when she turned around and asked in a funny little voice, “You don’t really think one of us might have done it, do you?”
I tucked my clutch more firmly under my arm. “I was just wondering,” I said.
She shook her head like she was trying to think that through. “I can’t imagine any of us doing such a dreadful thing. Of course Nancy has been dreadfully jealous of Willena lately, because of Horace.”
When I didn’t say
anything, she explained. “Horace wanted to marry Willena before he met Nancy, you know. Willena turned him down, of course—he had no charm whatsoever, and she had no need to marry him for his money. But Horace was set on marrying Willena. He married Nancy on the rebound.”
If I stretched my mind back twenty years, I could remember Horace and Willena dancing together at country club dances, but I’d never seen them as a couple. For one thing, he was three years younger. That’s a lot at that age. For another, he was already a plump young man with unruly hair, beads of moisture on his forehead, and sweaty palms. Only an egoist like Horace would think he had a chance with Willena back when she was still fresh and lovely.
Had she begun to have second thoughts?
“I thought she and Grover—” I began.
Wilma’s pink handkerchief sketched a graceful wave. “Oh, no. They are”—she gulped and soldiered on—“they were friends. Nothing more.” She turned back to the window and her shoulders shook.
Guess Who's Coming to Die? Page 12