Wedding Bell Blues

by Ruth Moose

  “Hmm,” I said, out loud this time.

  I picked up the keys, went out the back door and jogged over to the truck. I knew Ossie could see me from his office, but my latest encounter with him told me he wasn’t interested in anything I said or did. I’d bet anything he still had his nose glued to that computer screen.

  I tried one of the keys in the rear lock and heard a rumbling noise as the gate lifted. Nearly scared me to death. I jumped back. Who knew that was the right key and that it worked the lift gate? The gate rose very slowly until the whole interior of the truck was wide open. Wide open to dark and more dark. Empty. There was nothing in that truck bed but a small stack of white boxes. I climbed into the truck bed and opened one of the boxes. Rows of dozens of new orange prescription bottles. Empty ones. Was Butch hauling pharmacy supplies?

  So what was all this fuss about?

  I closed the boxes, jumped down and pushed the button to lower the gate, all the while checking to see if Ossie or Bruce had seen me or heard something.

  All was still. All was quiet.

  I slipped back in the office to lay the keys exactly where I found them on Bruce’s desk. I tiptoed in and was ready to lay the keys very carefully and without a single jangle when I felt a big, heavy hand hot on my shoulder. “Ohhhhhh,” I said and pivoted into a tall and wide masculine body. Bruce Bechner.

  “Hey there,” he said. “Admiring my babies?”

  I held my breath, backed up and very slowly laid the keys on the desktop. Not a single jingle jangle sounded. Whew.

  “Ba-babies?” I stuttered.

  “My violets.” He smiled and lifted his chin. “There,” he indicated. “On the windowsill. The light is perfect. Aren’t they amazing?”

  “Beautiful,” I said. “Just beautiful.”

  He walked to the window, lifted up a fluffy pink African violet, said, “This pretty little girl is my Apache Primrose. One of my best sellers. At home I got two basement rooms filled with these violets in every shade of pink, purple and white. Some double, triple, some big, some small. Every week mama and me ship out dozens … all over the country. You’d be surprised how popular these things are.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “You really must have a green thumb.”

  “Not green.” He placed the potted African violet back on the sill, “They’re easy to grow.”

  I told him about the wallet I’d just given Ossie, that it was proof the man Reba thought she killed was not the one she was engaged to, who was a Butch Rigsbee who sounded like one of Allison’s regulars and whose presence in Littleboro was unaccounted for.

  He scratched the side of his face, but listened intently, thanked me and headed down the hall toward Ossie’s office.

  In the parking lot, I jumped in Lady Bug and scooted back to the Dixie Dew. Those keys on that desk were too easy. Too deliberate. They were either meant for somebody to find or simply there because Littleboro’s “trained professionals” were totally inept.

  Either way I’d found something, but I didn’t know what I’d found. Certainly no body and no money. But I had recovered that wallet and turned it over to Ossie and that was one step toward finding out what was going on with this latest crime caper, maybe even a murder, in Littleboro. Not good stuff.

  Chapter Twelve

  In the Dixie Dew kitchen Ida Plum poured me iced tea and put the pitcher back in the fridge. At the Dixie Dew we don’t use the regular pound-of-sugar-per-tea-bag recipe. We leave it unsweetened and offer a sugar syrup, and always have fresh lemon at the ready. Mama Alice used to say, “We boil water to steep it, ice to cool it, sugar to sweeten it and lemon to spike it.”

  “I think one of our guests may be a judge for the festival. Or both of them,” Ida Plum said. “They seemed to know each other.”

  Festival. I was so involved with Reba and her God thing and the missing Butch Rigsbee that I’d pushed the whole shindig out of my mind. Not only did the Green Bean Festival have Scott gainfully employed for odds and ends but all of Littleboro was buzzing both pro and con. Who would come to our little town to celebrate the green bean? Who cared? Who even liked the stuff? We might as well salute something that had more guts and glory, like the black-eyed pea, for gosh sakes. Or as Ida Plum had said, “Creasy greens. Now they are something special. Or collards.”

  Littleboro’s lady mayor, the Honorable Calista Moss, had hatched the idea for something to put our “precious little village” on the map: a Green Bean Festival. What did we grow in Littleboro that grew better and more abundantly than anywhere else? Green beans! There was to be a cooking contest, a parade and as many activities to do with green beans as she and her committees could come up with.

  Last week Mayor Moss announced she was throwing a wingding of a fund-raiser, something she called a trashion show. What this had to do with celebrating the green bean, I didn’t know, but it was a gala event. Our Miz Mayor said she expected a lot of “in” people would come. I guess they would have to be the “in” people. I sure didn’t know anyone here in Littleboro who would go. After the committee meeting when I told Ida Plum, she thought this was the craziest idea she’d heard yet. She had to hit her sides she laughed so much.

  “Trashion,” I told Ida Plum, “is your kind of thing, right up your alley. Making something out of nothing. Making do, recycling. Taking something that would be thrown away and turning it into, in this case, a wearable outfit. And having a fashion show with models to show off the creation. Malinda plans to wear a strapless ball gown made from several purple plastic table cloths decorated with white polka dot prescription bottle caps.”

  “This I’ll have to see to believe,” Ida Plum peeked over my shoulder at Miz Mayor’s registration form. “People wearing trash. I heard about people talking trash and people called trailer trash and just plan trash, trash, but taking garbage and wearing it? You gotta show me because I don’t think it can be done. That mayor’s going to be the laughingstock of Littleboro before all this is over.”

  “Trashion,” she turned on her heel and went back to the kitchen. “Umph, some people around here don’t have enough to do.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Scott and I don’t talk business unless it is Dixie Dew business and lately that had been at the bottom of his list. I worried my gazebo was not even on his to-do list. I had also resolved not to nag. A gentle prod was as far in that direction as I planned to go, even if I could see some panic in my future when the Dixie Dew hosted Ossie and Juanita’s wedding “on the green” with no gazebo in sight. I could do that—all cash for the coffers—but not happily. Ossie wasn’t anywhere near my list of favorite people, but I did want this wedding to be sweet and beautiful, if not perfect, for Juanita’s sake. I knew there was no accounting for taste when it came to choosing a mate, and besides, it was none of my business. Juanita would have to live with her choice, not me.

  I had no idea what the trashion show had to do with green beans or what exactly the funds raised were to be used for. The cooking competition I could see, though I wondered what in the world one could cook with green beans besides the ubiquitous casserole with fried onions and mushroom soup. My vision for cooking creatively with green beans was mostly limited to the Thanksgiving casserole, but Mama Alice cooked them with fat back and potatoes. I ate the potatoes.

  Other planned events were the crowning of Miss Green Bean, maybe a street dance or two, some music groups, some craft booths around town. Anybody who had something to sell that people had been living perfectly well heretofore without would be hawking their wares. Oh, this Green Bean Festival was going to be a hoot. Last week Malinda and I had been laughing about it, daring each other to run for Miss Green Bean.

  “Can’t you see ‘Miss Green Bean’ on your résumé some fifty years from now?” Malinda had hooted, both arms raised. “Or in your obituary?”

  We then composed an imaginary obituary for The Mess.

  I began, “Miss Vita Sue Hanly, age ninety-eight, died quietly in her sleep at the home where s
he was born and lived all her life…”

  “… excepting her four undergraduate years at Woman’s College, where she majored in Interior Design, minored in French,” Malinda added.

  “Miss Hanly was an accomplished botanical artist. Her watercolors have been reproduced on note cards and sold widely,” I continued.

  Malinda and I laughed again. Miss Hanly would have had the note cards printed up herself and they would have gathered dust beside the register at Gaddy’s Drug Store. When had anybody in Littleboro ever written a note card except for funerals or weddings, and then the paper was always plain white?

  “Miss Hanly was crowned Miss Green Bean at the first Littleboro Green Bean Festival, which she said was one of the highlights of her life,” Malinda said, finishing her imaginary obituary.

  Poor thing. That’s Littleboro, I thought. They never forget. And they don’t let you forget either. The past is always present in Littleboro.

  Together Malinda and I had visualized this woman on her deathbed with a crown of green beans (either dried or plastic) adorning her tight little white curls, or whatever sprigs of hair she had left.

  And Scott, when he heard about the festival idea, had said, “My gosh. Green beans. They aren’t even sexy. Peaches are sexy.” He rounded his hands in the air like the shape of a peach. “Plums. Grapes. I could go for that. Pears? Even a pomegranate or two, but beans! Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart. The more you eat the more you—” Ida Plum snapped the dish towel at him before he could finish the rhyme and shooed him out the door.

  My Dixie Dew kitchen was a dropping-in spot for Malinda on her way to work at Gaddy’s Drug Store, and Scott, if he happened to be “passing,” as he said, between whatever renovating job he had going and Lowe’s or Honeycutt Lumber in Aberdeen or, like today, building booths at the fairgrounds. If he had spent the night, which he did on an irregular basis, and was there at breakfast when Ida Plum came in, she never said a word. Just lifted an eyebrow, turned her back and began doing whatever needed doing in the Dixie Dew kitchen, shrugging her shoulders as if to say, I know what you two are doing and you can’t fool me a bit.

  Malinda’s friendship livened my life, distracted me from adding up figures and looking at them in the red most of the time. What was I doing in a town that didn’t have a future? It had lots of past. I was surrounded by it. Big old falling-down houses that would take somebody pots of money to restore and not a lot of brains if they thought they could do it. But sometimes people like Calista Moss and her Mr. Moss showed up, bought the big old white house on the hill next to Miss Tempie’s estate and began pouring money into it. People with big bucks. People with deep pockets. One house getting new life and next to it, Miss Tempie’s castle was falling down more every day. Kudzu had already claimed most of it, and her handyman was in jail somewhere.

  Only a big old gray-blue barn still stood on Miss Tempie’s property. It listed a bit to one side, but still stood. Funny how barns can stand even after some houses go. Barns built of cheap lumber, never heated or cooled, mostly open to the weather, and they stayed tough. Barns are honest structures. And sometimes, like Mayor Moss’s barn, they get reinvented, repurposed and lead a glamorous new life.

  The Mosses had showed up one day “out of the blue” and started throwing money into the old Hemming house on the hill next to Miss Tempie’s kudzu-covered estate. They had a front lawn that took a hardworking landscaper on his John Deere all day to mow. And that was just the front yard.

  I’d been in the house once or twice for some committee meeting or other. The first time I went in, I just stood in that living room gazing up at the ceiling. All the moldings and details. The things I dreamed of having at the Dixie Dew. And the fireplace! Marble, with scenes of stags and hunts carved in the mahogany mantel. Thick, thick rugs in maroons and black. Elegant antique furniture, the real stuff. Not like all the real real stuff I had at the Dixie Dew that my grandfather Buie had made and some sentimental pieces that had been passed around in the family. Nothing elegant, just old. I never saw the rest of the Mosses’ rooms but I could imagine the decor.

  Malinda and I had to admit Scott had a point about the festival. Green beans were not sexy, but that was all Littleboro had. No peaches, no plums, not even any vineyards. And there were already a couple of vineyard celebrations, the toasting of the grape going on around the state. Ida Plum had been to some, and could talk about “the tasting of the grape.” But green beans? Kale would have had more appeal. Kale has a lovely leaf and I could think of a lot of ways to cook and eat kale. I could think of some artsy-craftsy things to do with leaves of kale. Stitch them together to make a sort of sun hat. Or a cloche. Roll them into beads, dip in wallpaper paste, let dry, string for jewelry. Spray with Krylon and decorate a wreath for doors. Spray gold, make a fan. But green beans? I wasn’t even close to any craft ideas.

  “Beans,” Ida Plum had said. “We’ll be the laughingstock of festivals. Beating out even Miss Liver Mush over in Shelby.”

  “Not in my book,” I said. “I’ve only tasted liver mush once in my life and that was the last time.” I shook my shoulders in a shudder. “Yuck. I’d take a bean over liver mush any day and time. And fields of green beans instead of acres of hog farms like they have in Smithfield.”

  I had to admit our honorable mayor was a cut above most of the women in Littleboro. For example, she wore shoes with kitten heels every day, not just to church, and shopped at Talbot’s—and places of the same expensive conservative ilk or above—in Raleigh. She had come to grace our village when I was living in Maine, and I didn’t know exactly where she came from or when. She’d done the ribbon cutting (pink, of course) when I opened The Pink Pineapple Tea and Thee here in the Dixie Dew. Class. I needed some class and she added it. Got us on the front page of The Littleboro Messenger. Not that I had crowds breaking down the doors in the days or weeks afterwards. She did take some of my business cards and said she’d pass them out whenever she could. I’d take all the good publicity available out there anywhere. Dark, gray, bad stuff had seemed to hover over the Dixie Dew at times. First my grandmother’s fatal fall, then Miss Lavinia Lovingood in my Azalea Room the second day the Dixie Dew was open for business.

  Ida Plum wiped the counter and said, “Scott is building some new freestanding booths for the festival. Those old ones at the fairgrounds rotted away years ago.”

  I hoped he was building better “convenience facilities.” I couldn’t remember the last time I went to a fair in Littleboro. Did we still have a county fair? When I was growing up it wasn’t much, a flimsy Ferris wheel, couple of spinning rides, church booths selling hot dogs and some displays of big pumpkins, watermelons, things that got blue ribbons. And the homemaking arts. All those jams and jellies and food canned in jars that had been sterilized in oversized pressure cookers. I remembered seeing gleaming jars of perfect green beans arranged like art and wearing fat blue ribbons.

  I remembered, too, the county fair was the first time I’d ever seen an outhouse. This one was a two-seater: had two holes cut side by side in the sitting place. I remembered pointing to it with Mama Alice, who laughed, which made me laugh.

  I told Ida Plum about this. She said what was funny was calling them convenience facilities. “Why not call an outhouse an outhouse? You call a horse a horse, not a cow. What are we doing to the language these days? Of course our mayor doesn’t want a lot of those little plastic tents set up all over the place for booths,” Ida Plum said. “You got to give her credit. She’s got taste.”

  “I bet she won’t let the fairgrounds have any of those plastic convenience facilities either,” I said. Personally I thought the purple ones were kinda cute. I’d vote for purple, but I’d bet if the things came in green, Mayor Moss would order them that color to coordinate with the theme of the festival.

  “So who is tasting the Green Bean Cook-off?” I asked, as I stirred honey and lemon in my jasmine tea.

  “Surely not Mayor Moss.” Somehow I couldn’t see her p
hoto in The Mess with a fork in front of her face, maybe a pucker of pure yuck on her lips. “Who would want to taste whatever concoction somebody could come up with made mainly of green beans?” Just the thought made my next swallow of tea less than delicious. I remembered the green stain on Reba’s “victim” on the picnic table, the sour taste when I did CPR.

  “Our judges.” Ida Plum went to the oven, and came back with hot lemon scones on a blue-checked tea towel. “The two staying here showed me their cards. Professionals, graduate degrees from some cooking schools, chef here, chef there. A food writer and a retired home economics teacher from Carelock U. I’d say between them they know foods.”

  Carelock University was a little bitty college set in the north end of the county—three brick buildings, a gym and a library, all established by Miss Idabelle Lucier from “Yankee Land” over a hundred years ago. She was reported to have said, “Those Southern girls are so beautiful, but unless they get some education, they are doomed to lead simple lives.” The reason the college was as far away from the town of Littleboro as it could be was that the founding fathers didn’t want all those rowdy female students tearing up things, not to mention being too much of an influence on “our innocent young people.” Over the years there was not only a definite town-and-gown feeling, but almost an invisible wall.

  “My, my,” I said. “If they’re judging scones, you get a triple-A rating for these. Lemon curd the secret ingredient?”

  Ida Plum ignored my question, let a smile curl up her lips on one side. “The woman who came in right behind them didn’t look like a judge of anything except of humankind in general. Had her nose so far out of joint, if she followed it, she’d end up in Alaska.”

  I laughed. “Our third guest at the Dixie Dew?”

  “She’s an odd duck if there ever was one.” Ida Plum took the plate of scones away from my side of the table, turned and put them on the counter behind her. “That woman—she, or maybe he, is a big one.”