Shadow of an Angle

by Mignon F. Ballard

  But Augusta didn't answer, and somehow I knew she wasn't going to. Augusta Goodnight had been to Angel Heights, South Carolina, before, and I had a feeling I wasn't her only mission.

  Chapter Five

  Don't you get sick and tired sometimes of hearing about Great-grandma Lucy?" Gatlin asked. "I mean, was there anything the woman couldn't do? It's beginning to give me a complex."

  "Yeah, I know. The Martha Stewart of Angel Heights. Vesta says she didn't even use a butter mold like everybody else back then, but etched a little design on top."

  Gatlin had come over early that afternoon to help me get settled, she said, and the two of us now waded through the obstacle course in the attic in search of an old library table Augusta insisted was there. My grandmother had taken her antique mahogany table with its two extra leaves to her new condominium, leaving the dining room at the Nut House bare.

  "It looks so empty in here," Augusta had said earlier, twirling on tiptoe in the center of the large paneled room. "And that table in the kitchen can't seat more than six." She waltzed from the bay window overlooking the muscadine arbor to the built-in cupboard in the corner. "There's just so much space, and I'm sure that old table's still in the attic."

  I didn't ask her how she knew. I wasn't sure I even wanted to know. "A table for six is more than I'll need, Augusta. I'm not planning any big dinner parties."

  But I could see she wasn't going to leave me alone until I explored my grandmother's cold, dusty attic to see if the table was there.

  "It's made of oak if I remember right," Augusta said. "A heavy old thing, but a perfect place to grade papers if you plan to teach next year, and there's room for a sewing machine at one end."

  "How heavy?" I asked. "And the last time I used a sewing machine was in home economics class in high school." I had made a C-minus on my baby doll pajamas.

  "You're not the only one here, Minda," Augusta reminded me, tucking a strand of her autumn-glow hair back in place. Today she wore her glorious tresses in a bright braid twined around her head, and her dress floated about her, looking as if it might have been hand-screened by Monet himself. "We'll look for it after lunch. I'll help you."

  It really didn't surprise me that Gatlin couldn't see her. The day had turned blustery and cold, and my cousin blew in the back door, shivering in a gust of frigid wind. Augusta had just taken a loaf of pumpkin bread from the oven, and the whole house smelled of cinnamon and nutmeg. My cousin and I ate it warm with some of Augusta's apricot tea. "What good timing!" Gatlin said, scooping up her last bite. "You've been hiding your talents, Minda. This bread is fantastic! What's that extra little flavor? Tastes like orange."

  "Don't ask me," I said. "I didn't make it."

  She looked around and then frowned. "Then who did? Not Irene Bradshaw. She can't boil an egg!"

  "My guardian angel," I told her. "Augusta Goodnight. She's standing right over there." I nodded toward Augusta, who obliged me with a graceful little curtsy.

  Gatlin glanced in the angel's direction, then shook her head, and smiled. "How convenient. Send her to my house when she's done, okay?"

  "Find your own angel," I said. "There's supposed to be an old library table in the attic. Want to help me look for it?"

  "Oh, I was so hoping you'd ask," Gatlin said, making a face. "I'll have to hurry, though. I've left Faye with a sitter while I run some errands, and Lizzie's due home from school in about an hour."

  I sneezed at the dust in the attic, shoved aside a rocking chair with no bottom, and stumbled over a porcelain chamber pot. Did my grandparents never throw anything away? "Is Faye better today? I hated leaving you last night with all that clutter, but there was no holding Mildred back!"

  "It's just a cold, but I'm keeping her in for a while, and the Circle ladies took care of washing up. Wish they'd come back every night!" Gatlin examined a washstand with a broken leg and moved aside an ugly iron floor lamp. "Boy, does Mildred ever have her drawers in a wad! I've never seen her like this. How was she when you left her?"

  "A lot calmer than I was," I admitted. "But she thinks somebody has been in the bookshop, says they moved her pencils."

  "Moved her pencils?" Gatlin laughed and then cursed when she bumped her ankle on an andiron.

  I explained as best I could. "Mildred said she could tell somebody had been prying around, and there were papers scattered about. Seems to think something's missing, too— wouldn't tell me what it was.

  "What will you do about Mildred if you can work out something about the bookshop?" I asked. "I worry about her living alone."

  "She can stay as long as she wants," my cousin said. "If Otto didn't leave her his share, we'll just have to see she's taken care of. He might not have thought to, Minda. Who would've imagined Mildred would outlive him?"

  Once we were downstairs, I reminded myself, I would telephone Mildred Parsons and invite her to dinner in case Vesta hadn't asked her already. And I mentally chided myself for not phoning earlier.

  "Here it is! Or at least I think this is what we're looking for," Gatlin called from the far side of the room.

  We had to lift two rolled-up rugs and a suitcase full of rocks (I later discovered they were filled with an old set of encyclopedias) to get to it, and the legs on the thing were as big as tree trunks, but the table looked to be in fairly good condition. It was bulky and solid and weighed a ton. Gatlin and I together could barely lift it off the floor, much less maneuver it downstairs.

  "Maybe if we take the drawer out…," my cousin said. I didn't think that would help, but we tugged at it anyway, and of course the drawer was stuck. When it finally squeaked free, the two of us almost tumbled into a box containing enough picture frames to fill a museum. Except for a small paperbound booklet of Shakespeare's sonnets, the drawer was empty. And the table was still too heavy to move.

  "Might as well put the drawer back," Gatlin said. "I'll ask David to get some of the boys on his team to get this down for you tomorrow."

  I was helping her to slide the bulky drawer into place when I saw the paper inside. "Wait a minute! Something must've fallen behind and become wedged underneath." I snatched out a folded rectangle, yellowed with time, and carefully smoothed it out. A brittle corner broke off in my hand.

  "Don't expect a passionate love letter," Gatlin advised me. "From all I've heard, our ancestors were too straitlaced and proper."

  "Except for your parents," I reminded her. "Are you forgetting I know how you got your name?" My cousin's mom and dad had conceived her on their honeymoon in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

  "You tell and you're dead meat!" she warned me. "I just let everybody think I was named for a gun."

  The paper wasn't a love letter, but it proved to be almost as interesting. "Looks like the minutes of some kind of meeting," I said, holding the paper to the light. "The Mystic Six. Must've been a secret club or something. Isn't that cute? I guess I never thought of people doing things like that back then."

  "I don't know why not. We did—or I did anyway. The Gardener twins, Patsy Hardy and me. We called ourselves the Fearless Four, and met underneath Vesta's back porch. You used to follow us around and try to learn the password!"

  "The password," I said, with my best attempt at a smirk, "was 'frog farts.' "

  "Was it really? How disgusting! No wonder I'd forgotten." Gatlin looked over my shoulder. "I guess this bunch was too refined for that."

  "No frog farts here," I said. "Just minutes." The proceedings of the meeting had been recorded in a delicate script in fading brown ink.

  The meeting of the Mystic Six was called to order by Number One. Number Two led the group in the Club Pledge and collected dues of five cents from each member. Number Three entertained with a lovely solo, "Beautiful Dreamer." This was followed by a business meeting, during which a report was given by Number Four on the subject of Honesty. Plans were made for our next meeting at the home of Number Two. Number Five then served delicious refreshments of sandwiches, lemonade, and nondescripts. Number Six read
the minutes of the last meeting, and Number One dismissed the group in the usual manner.

  Respectfully submitted,

  Number Six

  At the bottom of the page, someone (Number Six?) had sketched a tiny six-petaled flower with a star in its center. It was identical to the ones I had seen bordering my great grandmother's needlework at Minerva Academy and to the pin I'd found on the bathroom floor.

  The pin! What had I done with the pin?

  I'll bet anything Lucy was the one who sang 'the lovely solo,' " Gatlin said. "That would have been right up her alley, and this looks old enough to have dated back that far."

  I put the paper inside a copy of somebody's old botany textbook and took it downstairs. So far I hadn't told anyone about finding the pin. I wasn't ready to share it. Not yet.

  "Wonder if they went around calling each other by number?" I said. "And did you notice the insignia at the bottom? It's the same thing I saw at the academy."

  "I've seen it somewhere, too. Seems like it was on a quilt or something. Vesta would know. Or Mildred."

  But Mildred would have to wait. As soon as my cousin left that afternoon, I scrambled through the soiled clothing I'd brought back from Gatlin's, and there it was in the pocket of my jeans—smaller than a dime and as dainty as the ladies in the Mystic Six had surely been.

  How could a long-ago society of young women be related to my cousin's recent murder?

  I tucked the trinket away and decided to keep it a secret for now. If Otto had been killed for that pin, I didn't want to be next.

  Mildred didn't seem to understand what I was talking about when I phoned that afternoon. "What kind of flower?" she wanted to know. "And you say it had a star in it?"

  "Gatlin thinks she's seen a quilt with that pattern, and I thought you might remember it," I said. After all, she was the person who had cleaned all the nooks and crannies at the Nut House for the last thirty years or so. If anyone would know where something was, Mildred would.

  "I'm sorry, Minda, but I don't remember seeing anything like that," she said. And maybe it was because of all that had happened in the last few days, but I had a feeling she wasn't telling the truth.

  I found my grandmother in an agitated state when I dropped by her place later for supper. "I'll never eat all this funeral food," she'd said when she invited me. Not an appetizing thought, but I went anyway.

  "What's wrong?" I said when I saw her setting the table for four. I knew only two of us would be eating.

  "I believe they're going to have to change the name of this town to Devil Heights," Vesta said. "Gatlin called a few minutes ago to tell me somebody tried to run down Gertrude Whitmire while she was out walking this morning."

  "Is Mrs. Whitmire all right?"

  "I think so. I phoned to see how she was, and she said she was pretty well scratched up—scraped her knees and got a few bruises when she tried to jump out of the way. I'm afraid it messed up her ankle, too. Had an ice pack on it when I called."

  "Where did it happen?" I asked.

  "You know where she lives, way out in the middle of nowhere, and the house sits back from the road. I've been telling Gertrude she needs to move closer to town.

  "Anyway, she'd started on her daily walk—does three or four miles every morning—and just as she came out of her driveway, she says a car careened around that curve there and headed straight for her!"

  "She must've been terrified! How did she get out of the way?"

  "Gertrude said she thought the idiot would see her and swerve, and when she finally realized it wasn't going to, she sort of rolled backwards into the ditch."

  I tried not to think of that.

  "And listen to this, Arminda," my grandmother added. "While Gertrude was climbing out of the ditch, she saw the same car turning around to make another pass!"

  "I'd probably drop dead from fright," I said.

  Vesta put the extra place settings away. "No, you wouldn't, and neither did Gert. She knew if she tried to escape down the driveway, the car would follow and run her down, so she cut across the woods to a neighbor's. Only trouble is, the closest neighbor lives about a half mile away and is deaf as a post." Vesta shook her head. "Ben Thrasher. His daughter's been trying to get him to wear a hearing aid for years."

  "Can she identify the car?" I said.

  "Gertrude said it was sort of a tan color. Maybe a Toyota or a Honda—or it could've been a Saturn."

  "That really narrows it down," I said.

  There were times back in high school when I wished Gert would come down with acute laryngitis, but I never considered turning the poor woman into road kill. "Why would anybody want to do that?" I said. "…Unless they think she knows something about Otto's murder?"

  "Don't see how she could," my grandmother said, "but it's another reason for Gertrude to move closer to town."

  "Isn't there a Mr. Whitmire?"

  "Oh, Arminda, he's been gone for years."

  "Oh," I said. "I didn't know." Gertrude Whitmire and I had something in common.

  "Have you heard from Mildred?" Vesta asked.

  I nodded. "I asked her to join us for supper, but she said Edna Smith was bringing vegetable soup and corn muffins."

  Vesta frowned. "Still has her nose out of joint, but I suppose she's all right for the time being. I don't know why Hank Smith isn't as big as a barn with all the baking Edna does. Why Sylvie must've gained ten pounds since she's been back," she added, speaking of the couple's daughter.

  Born late in her parents' marriage, Sylvia Smith was a couple of years younger than Gatlin but had been educated at some prestigious boarding school, so I never really got to know her. "I thought she was living in London," I said. "Doesn't Sylvie work in a museum over there?"

  Vesta nodded. "Did. And seemed to be doing very well, according to Hank. She was in line for a big promotion when Edna had that knee replacement surgery last summer and Sylvie came home to see about her parents. Don't know why she never went back." My grandmother made a noise that sounded like something between a grunt and a snort. "I said something to Edna about it once, but she made it clear she didn't want to discuss it. Edna can get a little stiff-necked at times, but they've always been good friends to us, and it's kind of her to keep an eye on Mildred."

  We sat at Vesta's heirloom dining table eating leftover chicken pie from the night before, and looked out on her tiny balcony, where a dead fern waved in the wind. "Mildred gave it to me when I moved in here," my grandmother said. "I told her I'd forget to water it, but she wouldn't listen.

  "And since we're speaking of Mildred," she continued, "I went by the bookshop this morning to see how she was doing, but she wouldn't let me in. Said she was taking inventory, of all things. I was going to see if she wanted to go somewhere for lunch. Thought it might do her good to get out, but she wasn't having any part of it. Acting the martyr, if you ask me."

  I hadn't asked, but I agreed. "She thinks somebody was prowling around the shop while she was away. Said she was going to check and see if anything's missing."

  "What would anyone want? Nothing there but old books, and most of them aren't worth more than a quarter…. Here, please have some of this salad. The Circle committee brought enough for a battalion, and I'll never get rid of it all."

  The salad was green and wiggly, but I took some, anyway. "And why would anybody want to kill Otto?" I reminded her. "Nothing about this makes sense! I don't guess you've heard any more from the police?"

  My grandmother helped herself to one of Mary Ruth Godwin's yeast rolls and passed them along to me. "If they know anything, they haven't shared it with the rest of us. Gertrude Whitmire says she doesn't know if she'll ever work up the nerve to set foot in that place again." She buttered her roll and sighed. "Well, enough of that. Tell me, how are things at the Nut House?"

  If you only knew! I thought. But I told Vesta about the library table with the club minutes in it. "Must have been some sort of secret girls' thing," I said. "Had something that looked like an emb
lem at the bottom—a flower with a star in the center. The same thing's on that alma mater your mama stitched that hangs at the academy, and Gatlin said she thought she'd seen something like it on a quilt."

  "Dear heaven! I haven't seen that thing in ages. They took time about keeping that quilt, you know."

  "Who did?"

  "Why, the girls who made it. The Mystic Six. My mother was one. It was some kind of silly secret thing they organized at the academy. The quilt was supposed to tell a story about the school. I always thought it was kind of sad with that young professor dying in the fire and all."

  I smiled. "The Mystic Six. Wonder what that was all about?"

  "Who knows. But they were quite serious about it, I believe. Even had a pin."

  I declined more salad. "Really?"

  "I guess it was kind of like a sorority pin," Vesta said. "Mama had one, although I never saw her wearing it, but it looked like that design you saw in those old minutes, and it had her initials on the back. I keep it in my jewelry box."

  Elvis was singing somewhere upstairs when I got home that night, and I found Augusta in the room at the end of the hall with the record player that had belonged to my mother. She was shuffling to the music of "Jailhouse Rock," and the expression on her face could only be described as blissful. Mom's collection of 45s were fanned out on the table behind her.