Miss Ruffles Inherits Everything

by Nancy Martin

  The glare Posie sent me could have warned off a rattlesnake.

  Their sixteen-year-old son, Trey, slouched on the pew with his nose in a cell phone game. His cowboy hat was tilted down to show a Junior Rodeo patch instead of his face.

  Ten-year-old Travis Joe perched on Hut Junior’s lap, wearing a bow tie and bouncing as if he’d skipped his morning Ritalin. At the sight of Miss Ruffles, though, Travis Joe let out a cry of dread and tried to climb to the higher safety of his father’s shoulder.

  With some of her old spunk, Miss Ruffles turned and fastened a hard, predatory stare on the boy.

  “Sit down, Miss McKillip,” Hut Junior said to me over the band’s music as he attempted to subdue his squirming son. “But if that animal becomes a nuisance—”

  “I’ll take her out, I promise.”

  Meaning something else, Trey muttered under his breath, “I’ll take her out.”

  Posie slapped her son’s arm. “Hush, Trey. Honeybelle loved that dog. Show some respect for your grandmother.”

  Trey heaved an intolerant sigh.

  I tugged the leash, and for once Miss Ruffles obeyed me. I eased down onto the pew, and Miss Ruffles flopped down on the cool floor at my feet, still glaring at Travis Joe.

  Miss Ruffles and I both knew there wasn’t any use trying to endear ourselves to Hut Junior. I figured he planned on sending me on the first bus back to Chagrin Falls as soon as the service ended. And I’d overheard what fate he had planned for Miss Ruffles.

  I had accidentally eavesdropped while scrubbing one of Miss Ruffles’s mistakes out of the rug on the second-floor landing when he and Posie came like a couple of carpetbaggers to Honeybelle’s mansion two days after her death.

  “Can you believe it?” he’d said to his wife while she stretched a tape measure on the marble checkerboard floor at the bottom of the graceful curved staircase. “Mama’s nursemaid, Shelby Ann, declined to come to the memorial service because she’s already on a world cruise! There’s a reason half the town called her Moneybelle. Mama overpaid everybody.”

  Posie made a noise of agreement. “She’s been taking care of that crazy voodoo cook of hers for ages, and that ancient butler, too. They should have been sent away years ago.”

  “And I can only imagine what salary she gave the glorified dog walker.”

  Posie shushed her husband and told him to hold the other end of the tape measure. “We have to make sure my grandmother’s rug fits here. If it doesn’t, we’re going to take it to Dallas to get trimmed right away, because I want it here for my baby sister’s wedding.”

  Hut didn’t remark upon the wedding, which I knew had been a big bone of contention in the family. Posie wanted her sister’s lavish nuptials to be held in Honeybelle’s beautiful rose garden and had pushed hard for it. But at the time of her death Honeybelle still refused to give permission. With Honeybelle out of the way, though, I supposed Posie intended to throw a big society wingding, after all.

  Sounding strained, Hut Junior said, “We don’t have to move in here right away, do we?”

  “Why not?” After a pregnant silence, she said, “Oh, sugarpie, don’t get all weepy again.”

  He blew a honk into his hankie. “I have a hard time thinking about her being gone, that’s all.”

  “I know, I know. But your mama has been hiding your light under a bushel for too many years. You’re gonna be the big boss now. And you deserve this house. Besides, after her wedding, my sister’s going to need a home, and I promised she could have ours. Don’t you want to live here? You can smoke all the cigars you want on the terrace, and the boys will love the pool. And the rosebushes! At last I’ll get to enjoy the roses. We’ll make the place even more beautiful than it is already, you’ll see.”

  Hut didn’t respond to that. After a moment, he said more quietly, “If we’re going out of town for a rug, we should take that dern dog with us. I hate that dog. We could drop it off at a pound somewhere.”

  “Get rid of it?”

  “Do you want to be the one to start walking that wild animal? She’s dangerous. Not to mention obnoxious and … and … you know it’s the reason my mama kept falling. I ought to have insisted she get rid of it a year ago.”

  “Oh, Hut, don’t get upset. Honeybelle loved you more than Miss Ruffles.” Posie dropped her voice, too. “I hoped maybe she hired the dogsitter so she’d have more time for you and her grandchildren. Now we’ll never know, will we?”

  The dogsitter. She meant me.

  The prememorial band music came to a climactic close. Reverend Jones appeared like a magician through the hidden door behind the church’s altar. Miss Ruffles lifted her nose and gave a growl. The reverend had visited Honeybelle’s house regularly, and Miss Ruffles loved to torment him. She nipped at his shoes until he danced on Honeybelle’s fine rug. Seeing him appear so suddenly in the church, she sat up and barked. The sound must have carried the length and breadth of the sanctuary, because another frisson of silence passed over the congregation. I grasped her collar, but she fought me—eager to get free and dash up onto the altar to get herself a bite of the reverend’s tasty socks. About to speak, Reverend Jones hesitated as if stayed by the cautious hand of God.

  Hut Junior and Posie froze me with identical glares.

  “I’ll take Miss Ruffles outside,” I whispered.

  “Yes, you’ve made your point.” Posie fanned herself with the memorial program.

  Suddenly I didn’t care that we were going to miss the service. I could see the trip to the church had already served its purpose. Miss Ruffles looked her old self again, full of vinegar and eager to make trouble. She had said good-bye to Honeybelle and was ready to rumble.

  So we made a dash for freedom—not the way we’d come in, but by the side door that put us out on the parking lot side of the church.

  As we stepped outside, a whole crowd of people looked up at us from where they hung around their vehicles—pickup trucks and dusty cars that had clearly come from the outlying cotton farms. There were no fancy ladies in department store hats here, no distinguished town leaders. These were Mule Stop people who had come to pay their respects to Honeybelle but hadn’t found places for themselves in the church.

  At the sight of Miss Ruffles, the men removed their hats. A few ladies took out their hankies. One couple stepped forward. The woman bent down to pat Miss Ruffles.

  The man held his hat to his chest and said to me in a strong voice, “Miss Honeybelle loaned me seven hundred dollars back when we needed it bad. She drove it out to our place in her convertible and pretended like she owed me poker winnings so our kids didn’t know the truth. She didn’t have to do that, but it saved our family, got us back on our feet. She was a real lady. We’re gonna miss her.”

  His wife said, “We can’t believe she’s dead. Not our Honeybelle.”

  “Maybe half the town wanted to bump her off,” the man went on. “Her being so bossy and all. But the rest of us loved her.”

  A quiet line formed behind him, and one by one the silent mourners came forward. A lump rose in my throat as the people came closer to see Miss Ruffles, who never moved a muscle as they touched her. Here were people who had loved Honeybelle, and Miss Ruffles knew it.

  As they said their good-byes, I found myself remembering something Honeybelle joked about one afternoon when I helped her balance her personal checkbook.

  Flipping through a few ragged checks that had come in the mail, she said to me in her sweetest drawl, “If I die under suspicious circumstances, Sunny, please go to my funeral and decide who among my so-called friends likely killed me. Nobody likes repaying debts, do they? And they hate me for loaning money to them in the first place. So go to my funeral. Take Miss Ruffles with you. See if she can sniff out a murderer.”

  I had remembered her words the day I heard she died. And I hadn’t been able to get them out of my head. The people who lined up to pat Miss Ruffles seemed very grateful indeed. But maybe Honeybelle had been right. Maybe someone had want
ed to murder her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I’m southern. I like big hair and eyeliner.

  —CARRIE UNDERWOOD

  My mother, who prided herself on being a solid research scientist, always said, “Believe nothing until it can be verified.”

  It didn’t take the psychology professor I once worked for to see that after the loss of my mother, I had probably set out to find another strong, charismatic woman to take her place. Maybe this time someone who didn’t run off to distant jungles to study dying insects when I could have used some help writing book reports or choosing a prom dress. Or figuring out what to do with my life.

  Not that my mother was a drag. She was a hippie chick, a sometime college professor who studied butterflies and believed in field experience over classrooms. She got me into college courses with no particular goal in mind—whatever interested me at the time—and she didn’t care about my grades. She was too busy chasing butterflies in foreign countries. The most diplomatic way of describing her parenting philosophy was benign neglect. She could hack a trail through a jungle or look great on a bar stool to talk someone into donating money for a new expedition. My friends liked her sense of humor. Men liked her offhanded sexuality. She wasn’t the motherly type, and eventually I realized the butterflies needed her help more than I did.

  As for my father, she never thought it was necessary for me to know who he was. Maybe she wasn’t sure herself.

  Each summer when she went to save butterflies, I was sent to live with her parents on their dairy farm. But my grandparents tended to look at me as if I were some kind of exotic specimen my mother brought home from an expedition, so I never stayed long. I was happier on a college campus. As an adjunct, my mother wasn’t terribly well paid, and it became my job to keep her finances and her academic life on track. I smoothed her frequent dustups with whatever dean objected to her travels and organized her scientific data on computer files. It was the kind of work that made me valuable to other professors. So one job came easily after another.

  Before she went off to one of the last butterfly mating grounds in Mexico, I had handed her some clean socks to stuff into her duffel. My mother took them with thanks and then looked at me as if suddenly waking up to a research factoid she’d missed. She said, “Nature is strange and wonderful, kiddo. There’s something out there for you. Why don’t you go find it?”

  It stung—her perspective that I didn’t have a life.

  A month later, a person from the State Department found me to say she’d been killed falling off a cliff while chasing a butterfly—hardly a big finish for someone always in search of adventure.

  Honeybelle died with an equal lack of fanfare. But for me, her death felt as if my mom had tumbled off her cliff all over again. It was hard for me to accept they were both gone—both larger-than-life women who should have had more impact on the world before they left it.

  After the last humble citizen of Mule Stop said good-bye to Honeybelle with a pat for her dog outside the church, Miss Ruffles jumped against my leg. She looked up at me, eyes perky again, her stub of a tail suddenly wagging. The next moment, she took off down the steps.

  She knew her way home, and she pulled me down Sam Houston Boulevard, the town’s main drag, which ran all the way east to the interstate and west to where the old rail station and stockyards used to be, bisecting the college campus in the middle. The University of the Alamo was a noisy college that gave an otherwise sleepy town most of its energy. Students tended to major in agriculture or engineering for the oil industry. Or sports broadcasting, sports management, or sports medicine. Football provided the heart of the school.

  We passed by the public library, where a kind librarian often took her smoke break to look after Miss Ruffles while I checked out books. At a trot, Miss Ruffles led me past Gamble’s funeral home, the stately bank where Honeybelle served as a director, and the first of many college bars.

  The corner was taken up by the Boots ’N’ Buckles Emporium, which advertised Tony Lama cowboy boots, Stetson hats, fancy belt buckles, and saddle repair. Honeybelle had often stopped in to ask Joe, the elderly proprietor, to polish her boots. Barefoot while he made her boots shine, she tried on hats and teased him. He treated her like a queen. I remembered his check being among those from townspeople Honeybelle loaned money to, and I hoped he could afford to remain in business now that she was gone.

  Everywhere I looked there were things that would never be the same without Honeybelle—not just the businesses she patronized, or the small shops she’d financed. She had recently won a campaign for new street signs and flowers in window boxes, and triumphed in a fierce battle against litter and graffiti. Thanks to Honeybelle, Mule Stop looked pretty enough for its own postcard. Not a bad legacy, but not as good as seeing Honeybelle herself motoring down the main street, waving from her convertible as if she owned the whole town.

  Gracie Garcia came out of Cowgirl Redux, the clothing resale shop, and grabbed my elbow.

  “Is the memorial service over already? Or did they throw you out of church? Or—Lord have mercy, Miss Ruffles didn’t bite anybody, did she?”

  Gracie was the first person my own age I’d befriended when I came to Mule Stop. It had only taken a couple of days for me to realize my Ohio clothes weren’t suited to the searing Texas sun and heat, and Gracie had been a big help.

  “You might as well wear a big ol’ Yankee sign around your neck,” she had said pityingly when I first ventured to the door of her colorful shop. “What are you wearing? Darlin’, come inside and we’ll find you something real pretty. And bless your heart, you’re not wearing near enough makeup.”

  Today I hauled on the leash to prevent Miss Ruffles from trying to sniff the crotch of Gracie’s snug capri slacks. Gracie wore enough mascara to blind a whole cheerleading squad, and her long, glossy black hair curled fetchingly around her plump bare shoulders. She had come to Mule Stop to follow a “no account” boyfriend enrolled at Alamo, but when he dropped out to work on a gulf oil rig, she had stayed and made a place for herself. She ran the resale shop on weekends, and during the week she had a real job as a paralegal in a law office to keep up on her bills.

  I said to her, “Nobody threw us out of the memorial service. We said our good-bye to Honeybelle, and that was it. But I think Miss Ruffles really knew what was happening in there. Look, already she’s getting her energy back.”

  Miss Ruffles proved my point by trying to untie the ribbons on Gracie’s espadrilles.

  Gracie side-stepped to stay out range of the dog’s teeth. “Well, I’m glad nobody pitched a fit. Miss Ruffles belonged there just as much as that family of Honeybelle’s.”

  “The family was on relatively good behavior.”

  “I hear Hut Junior’s real broken up. All good southern boys love their mamas, of course. Or else use them for target practice. But what about Posie? Did she throw her hat in the air and dance a jig to celebrate her mother-in-law’s passing?”

  “Posie wasn’t happy—mostly about seeing Miss Ruffles in the church.”

  “Everybody knows Miss Ruffles bit President Cornfelter. But didn’t she take a bite out of Posie’s oldest boy once, too, right?”

  “Just nipped him,” I said quickly. “Tried to herd him into the swimming pool. She wasn’t the only one who thought he needed a dunking.”

  Miss Ruffles continued skittering around Gracie for attention and finally let out a frustrated yip. Laughing, Gracie bent down and took the dog’s head in her hands. They gave each other enthusiastic kisses. “You sweet puppy! No wonder Honeybelle loved you so much. Why, you’re just cuter than a possum!”

  Miss Ruffles panted happily, and I found myself smiling at last. “Already she’s cheering up. The memorial service really helped.”

  “Dogs are sensitive creatures.” Gracie gave the dog a pat on her ribs, then straightened to study me through narrowed eyes. “How about you? You still look poorly.”

  “I’ll be okay.” I couldn’t quite articula
te how sad I felt about Honeybelle’s passing. Maybe I should have stayed at the memorial service to hear some noble words spoken on her behalf. I still felt swamped by emotion, but seeing Miss Ruffles cavorting around us improved my spirits. I said, “It made us both feel better to say good-bye. And there were scores of people waiting outside the church. They were all so kind. It was touching to see them.”

  “Honeybelle did a lot of good things for people. I’m glad some of the grateful ones paid their respects. The rest of ’em are as common as pig tracks for not showing up.”

  “One thing surprised me. A man said half the town wanted to bump her off.”

  Gracie grinned. “Why does that surprise you?”

  “Because she did so much good.”

  Gracie had an unladylike snort. “She also had this town by its … well, its private parts. Not much business got done here in Mule Stop without Honeybelle’s approval. And Hensley Oil and Gas? Employs a lot of people—and she wasn’t shy about firing anybody who didn’t give her a hard day’s work.”

  “You really think Honeybelle had enemies?”

  “Sure as shootin’,” Gracie replied.

  I was still stewing over Honeybelle’s request that I be on the lookout for someone who might have wanted to kill her. She’d been joking at the time, but her words rang in my ears.

  I said, “One of Honeybelle’s grandsons seemed very upset that she’s gone.”

  “The younger one? Yeah, I heard he was sick when he was a baby. Story goes, Honeybelle read him books every day in the hospital. That was real nice, and they bonded. Not that her daughter-in-law would notice.”

  “They were always a little cool with each other,” I said cautiously.

  Gracie had no qualms about gossiping. “I reckon Posie resented how Honeybelle wouldn’t let Hut Junior take over the oil company. I mean, he’s forty, if he’s a day, right? Why he didn’t just buy himself a bass boat and go fishing for the rest of his life, I’ll never know. So tell me. What did the memorial look like? Did they have some pictures of Honeybelle around?”