Too Late for Angels

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “Rest? Rest from what?” Zee said. “And just how do you expect me to rest when everybody hates me? Jo Nell and Idonia wouldn’t even speak today.”

  “They’ll get over it, and so will you,” Lucy told her, “and nobody hates you, Zee.” Except maybe Calpernia’s spooky sister.

  Jay, who had given up on coaxing Zee away, had taken to pacing; now he stopped in mid-stride. “I think it might be better if I found another place to stay, Zee. I don’t want to tarnish your reputation.”

  “Ha!” For the first time that afternoon, Zee St. Clair smiled. “You’re too late for that claim, my friend. Besides, where would you stay? Opal Henshaw—runs that B and B she calls the Spring Lamb—came up to me after the service today and told me I needed to go right back inside and get on my knees and pray! I don’t think she’ll be welcoming you with open arms, Jay.”

  “Opal Henshaw’s an ass,” Ellis said. “You’re just going to have to grit your teeth and ride it out like the rest of us, Jay Warren-Winslow.”

  Zee frowned. “What do you mean, the rest of us?”

  “That little smarty-pants Ed Tillman asked me not to leave town until they find out who killed Shirley/Florence,” Ellis said. “They think I did it, you know.”

  At that Zee looked up at the steeple towering above them and closed her eyes. “We could sure do with a guardian angel,” she said.

  “I almost swallowed my tongue when Zee said that about the angel,” Ellis said later as they stored leftover food in Poag Hemphill’s refrigerator. Most of the dinner crowd had drifted away except for a few lingering relatives and a handful of Poag’s faculty friends.

  Lucy laughed. “Me, too! I’ll have to mention that to Augusta.”

  Ellis spooned rice casserole into a plastic container. “So what is she doing here?” she asked. “I thought angels knew everything. Isn’t she supposed to help?”

  “I’m sure she will in time,” Lucy said. “She said it requires some thought.”

  “Huh! You tell her I might require her to bake me a cake with a file in it when they lock me away!” Sighing, she looked about her. “Speaking of cake, what are we supposed to do with all this food? Lollie Pate brought over a whole pound cake we haven’t even cut.”

  “I guess we could freeze it, or, better still, take it to the church. Tomorrow’s Sunday and the youth groups will be meeting—they’ll gobble it up.” Lucy set the cake aside. “Lollie’ll never know.”

  “That was nice of her to help with the serving today, since she doesn’t even belong to our church,” Ellis said. “Lollie looked tired, don’t you think? But she said she wanted to do something to help out, and frankly I don’t know what we would’ve done without her with so many of our circle members out sick.”

  “Maybe we should join a younger circle,” Lucy suggested. “Seems somebody’s always ailing…let’s face it, I reckon we’re all getting old!”

  “Except Calpernia,” Ellis reminded her. “And Shirley/Florence.”

  Somebody from the faculty had taken Calpernia’s sister to the airport soon after dinner, but Poag’s family remained. Poag and his sister Myra came into the kitchen to thank them just as Lucy finished wiping off the countertops while Ellis attempted to sweep up the afternoon’s assortment of crumbs.

  “You two don’t know how much this means to me,” he said, hugging them in turn. “And I know it would mean a lot to Cal, too.” His voice broke when he mentioned her and Myra stepped in.

  “Your circle outdid themselves on the food,” she said. “Everything was wonderful and we really appreciate your being here.” She patted Poag’s hand. “And now, little brother, I think you should try to get some rest.”

  “Good idea,” Ellis told her. “There’s enough food here for an army, so you might want to freeze some. If you don’t mind, though, Lucy Nan suggested taking this pound cake for the young people at the church. Lollie brought it over from Do-Lollie’s, so I’m sure it’s good, but we really didn’t need it.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine,” Poag said, turning away, but he didn’t look fine at all. His face was gray and drawn and he walked with such a faltering step, Myra steered him into the nearest chair. “I think you need to see a doctor,” she said, turning to Lucy, who agreed.

  But Poag Hemphill shook his head and after a minute he stood. “A doctor can’t help what’s wrong with me,” he told them. “Only time can do that.”

  “I meant to ask somebody what happened to Boyd Henry today,” Ellis said later as they pulled into her driveway. “Doesn’t he usually play with The Fiddlesticks?”

  “I heard somebody say they were waiting for him and that’s why the service was late getting started,” Lucy said. “You’d think he would’ve called if he couldn’t come. I hope he’s not sick.”

  Since Bennett wouldn’t be home until the next day, Lucy offered to go inside with Ellis just be to sure everything was okay.

  “That’s silly,” Ellis told her. “I’m used to being here alone with Bennett out of town so much. Besides, you have to go home to an empty house all the time.”

  “Not anymore. Augusta’s there, remember?” Lucy had never become accustomed to coming home with no one there. “I’d feel better about it, really—especially after all that’s been going on lately. Humor me, okay? At least let me go with you until you turn on a light. It’s as dark as a coal cellar out here.”

  Ellis shrugged. “Suit yourself. We’ll go in the back way and if you beg me, I’ll let you give me a hand with those casserole dishes that have to be returned.” She snorted as she led the way through the back gate. “I’ll swear, it looks like people would learn to use the disposable foil kind!”

  They had divided up the dishes earlier: Ellis would return those to circle members who lived near her, and Lucy would do the same with hers. She was struggling with a cardboard box filled with breakable containers and assorted trays when she heard Ellis scream.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lucy set down the box in the driveway where she stood and ran through the open gate to the backyard. Ellis had switched on the lights that illuminated the rear of the house as well as the patio and pool area and now knelt at the deep end of the pool clutching a long pole with a net on one end used for scooping out debris. A dark shape bobbed on the shadows a few feet away. A human shape. “Oh, dear God,” Lucy mumbled. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know! Call nine-one-one, get an ambulance—hurry!” Ellis shouted, and casting the net aside, kicked off her shoes and jumped into the water.

  Lucy was torn between helping her friend rescue whomever was in the pool and summoning help, but Ellis seemed to be doing all right without her so she dashed for the house, her heart beating so hard it hurt. Ellis’s keys were still in the back door, which was unlocked. Ellis’s handbag and a tray of empty dishes sat just inside the door and a faint light from above the stove cast the kitchen in shadow. Lucy flicked on the light over the breakfast bar and reached for the wall phone, stubbing her toe on a stool in the process. Remembering what she had seen on television about emergency calls, she took the receiver with her in case they needed instruction in CPR.

  They didn’t. Ellis had somehow managed to pull her dripping burden halfway up the side so the head and torso lay facedown on the edge of the pool while the lower half of the body remained in the water. “I think we’ve found Boyd Henry,” she said, shivering in the eerie light that made everything look pasty. “Looks like his foot got caught in the ladder.”

  “The rescue team is on the way,” Lucy told her as the two of them struggled to roll the dead weight that had been Boyd Henry Goodwin onto the side of the pool.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late,” Ellis said. She checked for a pulse and shook her head. “No telling how long he’s been in there.”

  The man’s eyes were cloudy and his skin a greenish red, still Ellis began compressions on his chest. The green suede-cloth dress she had worn to the funeral sloshed with every move.

  “Ellis, it’s no use! G
et inside and put on dry clothes. You’re freezing.” Lucy shoved her friend aside and shuddered as she touched Boyd Henry’s cold, clammy skin. His jaw was slack and she noticed what seemed to be abrasions on his cheek and forehead. She had learned CPR years ago as a Girl Scout leader, but it was too late to help her neighbor now. When the rescue squad arrived about five minutes later, Lucy was still crouching over his sodden form, and when someone with warm firm hands pulled her away, she began to cry.

  Lucy stood back to watch one of the men examine Boyd Henry while two others waited to lift him onto a stretcher. She recognized the person kneeling beside Boyd Henry as the man who worked in the produce department of the Winn Dixie where she traded. She didn’t know his last name, but Lucy had heard some of his co-workers call him Red. Now Red looked up and shook his head at the others. “We won’t be needing that yet,” he said grimly. “I’m afraid it’s too late for this one.” Lucy trailed behind him as he went to radio in from the waiting ambulance. “Where will you take him?” she asked.

  “We’ll have to wait for the coroner now,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s Mr. Goodwin, isn’t it? I used to see him now and then when I was taking some courses at the college. Do you have any idea how this might’ve happened?”

  Lucy told him how they had found Boyd Henry in the deep end of the pool. “No one was here last night and for most of the day,” she said. “He must have fallen in somehow.”

  “Been in there for a while, by the looks of him,” Red said. “He might have had a heart attack or a stroke. Of course all that will come out in the pathologist’s report.”

  “You mean they’ll perform an autopsy?” Lucy closed her eyes, remembering the thing that lay beside the pool, the thing that had been her neighbor.

  “Have to when there’s a suspicious death,” he said.

  Ellis, who had changed into a faded exercise suit and purple quilted bedroom shoes, hurried from the house, hair dripping. “Poor Boyd Henry! How do you suppose this happened?” she asked, shivering.

  “That’s for the police to find out,” one of the would-be rescuers said as he carried lifesaving equipment back to their vehicle.

  “The police?” For a moment Ellis seemed stunned, then she took a deep breath, averting her eyes from the form that lay only a few feet away. “Well, of course they would be the right people to call in a situation like this! God only knows how long he’s been in the water,” Ellis said. “And what on earth was he doing in there? You don’t suppose he meant to drown himself, do you? Come to think of it, he did seem kind of despondent when I spoke with him yesterday.” Her hands trembled as she clamped them over her face.

  “We can’t do anything more for Boyd Henry. I’m more concerned about you right now,” Lucy said as she ushered Ellis inside. “Let’s get something hot in you before you come down with something.”

  “You sound just like my mother. You know good and well you don’t catch cold from getting chilled,” Ellis said, but she didn’t object to being hurried inside. There she turned on the oven and pulled up a chair to huddle by the open oven door. “I wonder when the police will get here.”

  Lucy, filling a kettle at the sink, noticed two uniformed figures approaching from the rear gate. “My guess is right now,” she said, and moved to the door to greet them.

  “Ed Tillman! No offense, but we seem to be seeing entirely too much of each other lately…Watch that puddle there, Sheila. Ellis dripped water all over the steps after she fished Boyd Henry from the pool.”

  Behind her, Ellis groaned an obscenity.

  Two hours later, after taking measurements, photographs, and dusting for prints—or trying to, the investigators roped off the pool area and left, taking the body with them.

  Ellis propped her face in her hands and looked at Lucy across the kitchen table. “Now, to add to my other heinous crimes, they think I drowned Boyd Henry,” she said. In addition to Ed and his partner, the two of them had also been interviewed by Stone’s Throw’s police chief, Elmer Harris, and a stiff-faced detective Lucy didn’t know who never sat down. Ellis said she thought he suffered from hemorrhoids.

  “Then they really aren’t operating on all cylinders,” Lucy told her. “We won’t know for sure until they do an autopsy, but Ed told me the coroner said it looked like he’d been in the water at least twenty-four hours. You’ve been with me almost the whole time. Just when were you supposed to have done it?”

  Ellis sighed. “You wouldn’t make much of a detective. He was here with me in this kitchen yesterday until dark. I could’ve pushed him in before I left for your house.”

  She drew in her breath and covered her face with her hands. “Dear God, Lucy Nan! Boyd Henry was probably doing the dead man’s float this afternoon when I came home long enough to change clothes and heat up my casserole before we went to Calpernia’s funeral. I never even thought to glance out back.”

  “It’s just as well you didn’t. What good would it have done?”

  “None, I guess…but somebody must’ve shoved him in there. You know what a private person Boyd Henry was. If he planned to kill himself, I can’t believe he’d do it on somebody else’s property.” She stood at the kitchen window looking out at the pool where their neighbor had died. “I know this sounds silly, but Boyd Henry Goodwin was too polite to deliberately cause such a ruckus.”

  “I agree. It wasn’t like him at all.” Lucy made a face. “Most improper—and I read somewhere that, senseless as it may be, most suicides remove their shoes before going in the water. Boyd Henry was fully clothed—shoes and all. Maybe he had a heart attack or something. He always seemed so soft-spoken, so…well…benign. I can’t imagine why anybody would to do this to him.”

  “Did you notice if he had been hit over the head or anything? I didn’t think to look. I wonder if he knew how to swim.”

  Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but I’m beginning to think he might’ve known something else.”

  Ellis switched on another light and double-locked the back door. “What do you mean?”

  “He must have known something somebody didn’t want him to tell,” Lucy said.

  Her own kitchen smelled of something wonderful that simmered on the stove. Lucy inhaled the aroma of bay leaves and oregano in a rich tomato sauce as soon as she stepped in the doorway. She tossed her coat on a chair and missed, wishing she hadn’t lost her appetite.

  Augusta stood on tiptoe to reach the cabinet where Charlie had kept what Mimmer had called his “spirits,” and produced a bottle of red wine. “You look like you could use a glass,” she said, pouring one for herself as well. “Is anything wrong?”

  “I’ll say!” Lucy accepted the glass gratefully, stepping out of her shoes on her way to the small family room where her comfortable chair awaited. “Oh, good! I see you’ve already built a fire. Let’s sit in here where we can stretch out and relax and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  She thought it was a pillow until it moved. A shaggy round form of black and white with a splash of brown uncurled itself from the seat of her favorite chair and looked up at her as if to say, “How dare you interrupt my nap!”

  “I’m afraid she’s quite taken with your chair,” Augusta said. “Seems to prefer it to any other.”

  Lucy had forgotten about Clementine. Now she scooped up the soft warm mound of yawning puppy and deposited her on the floor. “Well, she’s going to have to share it,” she said, stretching her feet toward the fire. The dog wagged its tail, gave her a quizzical look and promptly jumped up into Lucy’s lap.

  Augusta laughed. “It seems to me that you are.”

  Lucy nuzzled the animal’s soft ears. She had to admit the puppy was cute. Earlier that day she had taken liberties with the truth when she telephoned Patsy Sellers at Bellawood to tell her the little dog had somehow followed the children home on the bus. Of course Patsy was delighted to give her permission to keep it.

  Now Lucy cradled the wineglass in her hand as she told Augusta how she and Ellis h
ad found Boyd Henry’s body in the Saxons’ swimming pool.

  Augusta stared into the fire and sipped her wine. “Do you think he might have taken his own life?” she asked. “Ellis said he seemed a bit distressed when she spoke with him yesterday.”

  “You mean because of the guilt he felt about the day little Florence was taken?” Lucy frowned. “After all these years? His conscience must’ve taken a long vacation!”

  “He could have said something—possibly led police to the couple who took her—yet he didn’t,” Augusta said. “That’s a terrible burden to carry, and then, of course, the poor woman met an unfortunate end right across the street from…” Augusta set down her glass so hard Clementine sat up abruptly, ears at attention.

  Lucy stroked the dog’s head, calming her. “What is it?” she said.

  “Florence died on the back steps of the Methodist Church, which is directly across from where Boyd Henry lived. You said he sometimes worked in his yard at odd hours. What if he saw something—someone—that night? It might have seemed perfectly innocent until he learned what had happened there.”

  Lucy nodded. She and Ellis had already danced around the fact that Boyd Henry Goodwin might have been murdered because of that. “But why Ellis’s pool? Now the police will think she had something to do with it.”

  “That’s probably the reason. Ellis had already been questioned in regard to Florence’s death. What could be more convenient than to do away with Boyd Henry in her family’s pool? I wouldn’t be surprised if the poor man wasn’t killed soon after Ellis left to come here last night. She said he was there until well after dark.” Augusta stood so suddenly, her long necklace swirled. “The stew! I almost forgot about the stew!