An Angel to Die For

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “I can come back later if you want me to,” Ralphine offered.

  “Good heavens no! There’s always something to do around here,” Mom told her. “Prentice, why don’t you go upstairs with Ralphine and help her straighten that messy hall closet? It’ll give me a chance to visit with Ola.”

  Augusta had tidied that same closet a few days ago, but obviously Mom hadn’t looked in there yet, so I said okay and went along upstairs. I remembered seeing boxes of books in there that that nobody would probably ever read again, and thought Ralphine might like to take some home.

  “Lord, yes, I do like to read a good mystery whenever I get the chance—but then people in hell want ice water!” Ralphine laughed. “Don’t know when’s the last time I actually had time to sit down and read, but miracles do happen. Hell, that shiftless Jasper Totherow’s stayed outta jail for over a year now. That’s a miracle in itself!”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen him lately?” I flipped through a well-read copy of Little Women and added it to my pile to keep.

  “Lord, don’t I wish I hadn’t! Jasper doesn’t come around much—’specially since I swore out a warrant against him.” Ralphine slammed a book aside. “But if that man wants something, you can’t run him off with a red-hot poker, and he stays about one breath ahead of the sheriff’s bunch. Thought I was rid of him for a while there. Guess he’s learned I’m not giving him any money, but he came by yesterday with some kind of little old dinky bracelet he wanted me to keep for him. Said I could have it if I dropped my complaint with the police.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “Told him to take a flyin’ leap into a bucket of shit. What would I want with that tacky old bracelet? Probably stole it anyway!”

  “So you didn’t keep it?”

  “Didn’t want anything to do with it. God knows where he got it, and Jasper’s scared of something. I don’t want to get mixed up in it. Found out later he’d passed it off on one of the girls. Gave Brandi Lynn a dollar if she’d hold on to it till he got back.” Ralphine shook her head. “A whole dollar now! First money that kid’s ever seen from her old man—and probably the last!”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  I picked up the last book in my stack and flipped through it to be sure there was nothing tucked inside. It was one that had been on the best-seller list several years back and I remembered giving it to Mom for Christmas when I was still in college. I assumed she had dutifully read it, then added it to her pile of “been there and done that.” A small piece of paper drifted to the floor and I picked it up, meaning to throw it away, but something caught my eye: it was the logo at the top.

  The paper was a receipt from The Quick Cash Pawn-shop in Atlanta for my mother’s heirloom pearls.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The digital tinkling of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” came from the kitchen where Joey lay on his back in a playpen kicking a musical toy. The baby laughed and reached for the bright plastic rings suspended above him. My mother and Ola sat at the kitchen table, cups of coffee untouched before them. My mother’s eyes were red, her cheeks wet with tears. Ola drooped in her chair with her head propped in her hands, her frail shoulders trembled. Sitting there like that, they might have posed for an artist’s rendering of “Grief.”

  I tried to tiptoe past them, give them time to share the remnants of their memories of Maggie, but Ralphine in her size ten brogans thundered in before I could stop her.

  Mom looked up and made an effort to smile. “Ola and I have been filling in the gaps,” she said and reached for my hand. “And oh, Prentice, there are too many gaps!”

  Ola took a wad of tissues from her pocket and blew her nose, then wiped her glasses on the sleeve of her dress. “I’m sorry, I just can’t help it.” She looked about her at the big yellow kitchen, the worn oak floors dotted with gaudy rag rugs our grandmother made. “I’ve heard so much about this place from Maggie, I feel like I’ve been here before.”

  “Did she talk about it a lot?” I asked. “About us?”

  Ola nodded. “Home was special to Maggie, and so were you. She meant to come back here, you know.”

  Mom and I looked at each other. “We didn’t know,” we said together. And wept. Ola Cress took off her glasses once again and joined us.

  Poor Ralphine, left standing there, dustcloth in hand, turned her attention to Joey. While the three of us searched for composure, she plucked him from his playpen and cuddled him in her vast lap. “At least you have the baby,” she said, in an obvious effort to comfort us. “And what a cutie pie he is! I’ll swear, Miz Dobson, I think he takes after you.”

  “I believe it would be best,” Ola said, still sniffing, “if you didn’t mention anything about the baby. His father’s family’s been harassing us, and they’re a pretty unsavory bunch. It wouldn’t do for them to know he was here.”

  “Swear out an injunction against them,” Ralphine advised, nodding sagely. “Wish I’d a done it long ago!”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Mom said. “Right now I think we just need time to get acquainted with Joey.” She smiled at Ola. “Ms. Cress is right, though. I don’t think it would be wise to say anything about having the baby here just yet.”

  “You got it,” Ralphine promised, and I knew we could count on her word.

  It wasn’t until after lunch that I remembered the slip of paper in my pocket. I was putting away the dishes while Ola and Joey napped upstairs, and Mom sat at the table making a list of “baby needs.”

  “I suppose you left your pearls back in Savannah,” I said, watching her face.

  She frowned. “My pearls? Why would I need pearls here? Do you think they still make that baby shampoo? The kind that doesn’t hurt your eyes. And those cute little towels with a hood?”

  “You don’t have them do you?”

  “Have what, the pearls?” She sighed. “Well, of course I have them, Prentice! Surely you don’t expect me to be like your aunt Zorah and carry the family valuables everywhere I go.”

  I smiled. It had always been a joke with us how my aunt took her silver chest along with her whenever she traveled out of town. Dad used to warn her she was taking a far greater chance of having it stolen from her car than if she’d left it at home.

  I placed the receipt from the pawnshop on the table in front of my mother and waited.

  She read the scrap of paper without touching it. “Where on earth did that come from?”

  I told her.

  “I could’ve sworn I threw that thing away. In fact, I meant to burn it. Prentice, I wish you hadn’t seen that old receipt. I didn’t mean for anyone to know about those pearls, especially you.”

  “Why not?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

  I looked again at the date on the receipt. It was during my junior year in college, a lean year for selling crops and cattle. And for paying college tuition. My mother had sold her pearls to help pay for my senior year.

  “Oh, Mama!” I knelt on the floor and put my head in her lap. “I don’t know whether to say ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘thank you,’ or both.”

  Gently she stroked the hair from my face. “Honey, they’re just beads. You and Maggie were all the jewels I ever wanted.” She glanced again at the list she was making for Joey. “And now we’ll have this little diamond chip . . . But for the life of me, I don’t know how that receipt got inside that book.”

  I thought I knew. Somebody had wanted me to find it there.

  “What are we going to do about Aunt Zorah?” I asked Mom later. “If we tell her about Joey, everybody in Liberty Bend will know it before the library closes for the day, and Be-trice is just as bad.”

  “Mercy! I didn’t think of that.” She looked out the window as if she expected to see our relatives driving up at any minute. “We certainly can’t take a chance on that. What can I do to keep them from coming over? If Zorah knows I’m here, she’ll want to hear all about Savannah.”

  “She might come over
anyway just to check on Uncle Faris’s grave,” I said.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard any more about that poor woman they found?”

  “Only they suspect she was killed by something called ‘vehicular homicide’—meaning they think somebody ran over her with a car. Don Weber says they’re trying to locate the vehicle. And as far as I know, Uncle Faris hasn’t turned up yet.”

  “Faris!” My mother snorted. “Too bad they didn’t make off with him a long time ago. Would’ve spared us a whole lot of grief.” She shook her head and frowned at me as if it were all my fault. “That Thornton Bonner doesn’t have the sense God promised a billy goat! Has no business being sheriff. Your dad went to school with him, you know; told me once Thornton flunked English two years in a row.”

  “The police seem to think they picked Uncle Faris at random—because he was buried apart from the rest,” I said. “Maybe they thought we wouldn’t miss him. Anyway, it doesn’t look like they’ll be back.” I wanted to get her off the subject before it led to the bathtub invasion, the open trench in the hillside, and the barn lot prowler.

  “That’s disgusting—even if it was Faris,” my mother said. “And you have no business staying out here a—”

  “We could tell Aunt Zorah you’re here recuperating from some kind of contagious disease,” I said. “You know what a hypochondriac she is.”

  Mom smiled. “Your dad used to say Zorah never failed to come down immediately with whatever ailment they featured on the TV medical shows.”

  “There’s a bad flu going around,” I said.

  “A new strain, I hear—and highly contagious.” Mom felt her forehead. “I do believe I’m feverish. Don’t I look feverish, Prentice?”

  I agreed that she did. I just hoped our relatives would buy it.

  “Poor Mom’s just burning up with fever . . . aches all over . . . can’t hold a thing in her stomach . . .” I had my speech memorized as I walked up the steps of the library a few days later. My three overdue books gave me a legitimate excuse for popping in with my distressing “news.” Should I drag my feet and appear listless so my aunt would naturally assume that I, too, was soon to become a victim of this horrid, virulent strain?

  Nope. Don’t overdo, Prentice. Besides, I wasn’t that good an actress. And my talents would have been wasted anyway because Aunt Zorah wasn’t there. Instead, Miss Donna Appelbaum sat behind the big front desk frowning over a stack of books in front of her. She looked up at me over her little Ben Franklin glasses and frowned some more.

  “Well, Prentice, I heard you were back in town. Things not work out in the city?” She shot me her illusion of a smile and it sent an icy dagger through me. Miss Donna had taught me in the fifth grade where we’d made each other miserable for a whole year, and the relationship hadn’t improved since. I once made up a poem about her and passed it around in class: Miss Donna the Piranha, a fitting tribute still. She took up the poem, of course, made me read it aloud. Now she was retired and honing her teeth on library patrons when Aunt Zorah wasn’t there.

  I pretended I hadn’t heard her. “Aunt Zorah’s not sick, is she?” (Heavens, maybe she’d come down with the dreaded influenza!)

  “Gone to one of those family reunions she traipses off to all the time. I should think you’d know, Prentice, being a Dobson and all. Somewhere in Florida this time I think.”

  I didn’t know. The last time my parents took us to a family reunion, Cousin Hortense from Mobile and Great-Aunt Josephine from Augusta got into a shouting match over somebody not being asked to be in somebody else’s wedding about a trillion years ago. We never went again.

  But Aunt Zorah belonged to just about every family organization she could join. They sent out newsletters, elected officers, the works, and Aunt Zorah was the High Poo-bah in several, so I wasn’t surprised to hear she’d taken off on another of what Dad used to call her “genealogical jaunts.”

  Miss Donna accepted my late fee, counting it twice just to be sure. “You’d think Zorah’d get tired of running around all the time to this that and the other—especially since she insists on lugging all that silver everywhere she goes. Asking for trouble is what she is! One of these days, she’s going to be conked on the noggin!

  “And how’s your mother?” she wanted to know as I edged toward the door. “Thought I saw her in Clyde’s Cupboard the other day picking up bread and milk.”

  “She’s sick,” I said. “Real sick. Some kind of virus. Can hardly lift her head.”

  “Some nasty thing she picked up in Savannah, no doubt. All that humidity. You won’t catch me going off to live in some place I don’t know anything about!” Miss Donna the Piranha thumped the stack of books in front of her. “Looks like old Maynard’s planning a trip to Mexico.” She made a sound that might be considered a giggle. “And you know what happens to you if you drink the water down there!”

  “Maynard Griggs?” I said it aloud without even thinking.

  “Only Maynard in town far as I know. Said he’d always wanted to go and decided to read up on it. Guess that stuck-up Ernestine will go along too, just so she can brag about it. If you ask me, people oughtta stay home where they belong . . .”

  Then why don’t you, you wicked old bitch? I wanted to say. But coward that I am, I just said good-bye and headed for the door.

  “By the way,” she called to my departing back, “did that man ever find you?”

  “What man?”

  “Some man came in here this morning asking if I knew where you lived. Had a beard.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  To tell or not to tell? I didn’t want to alarm my mother and Ola. The three of us were already as “jumpy as a frog on a pogo stick,” as Dad used to say, but if Sonny’s father was that close to finding us, we had to be prepared. “What now, Augusta?” I asked aloud, but if she was around, she didn’t answer. Yet I knew she couldn’t be very far away.

  I drove home by a route so complex and dizzying, I almost got lost myself.

  “Are you sure it’s Sonny’s father?” Mom wanted to know.

  “Who else could it be? I’m not expecting anybody with a beard.”

  “How old a person was this? Did Donna Appelbaum tell him where he could find you?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know.”

  Mom sighed. “Oh, Prentice, you didn’t ask her? Why not?”

  “All I wanted to do was get away from that woman before I said something I might regret,” I told her. “Besides, I guess it kinda shook me up to know this—this spooky bearded guy is right here in Liberty Bend.”

  “I wish Wally would hurry back,” she said. “He could tell us what to do.” Mom grew up with Wallace Turner who practices law in Atlanta and handles her legal affairs. “He and his wife are in Europe and won’t be home for another week. I have no idea how to reach him.”

  “He has several partners, doesn’t he? Couldn’t one of them advise us?”

  But my stubborn mother shook her head. “They might not understand. I’d rather wait for Wally.”

  “Then I think we should find another place for Joey,” I said. “I hate to keep moving him from here to there, but we’re isolated out here, Mom, and who knows what that man might do?”

  My mother started to answer, then held out her hand for silence. Joey was crying upstairs. I was learning his signals already. This one meant he was already hungry and working up to being mad.

  “Bottle time!” Mom smiled and started for the stairs.

  “Where’s Ola?”

  “Joey was running low on diapers, so I asked her to pick up a few groceries in town. Prentice, we need to talk about Ola,” she whispered. “Something’s not right. I’m worried about her.”

  I nodded. Augusta had said almost the same thing.

  Mom changed Joey’s diaper and reluctantly allowed me to give him his bottle. Earlier, under Ola’s supervision, the two of us had bathed the baby in the same big plastic pan my mother had used for Maggie and me, only I th
ink we got wetter than Joey did.

  “I guess you’ve noticed how much time Ola spends at the cemetery,” Mom said, reaching out to pat Joey’s fat knee. “For some reason she feels responsible for Maggie’s death.”

  “I know. I think she believes she could’ve stopped her somehow, kept her from going with Sonny. Whatever it is, it’s eating her up inside.”

  “It isn’t doing a lot for me, either,” Mom said, shaking her head. “And it can’t be good for Joey.”

  Soon after our arrival at Smokerise, Ola had asked me to take her to my sister’s grave. Once there, I could see she wanted to be alone. I left her kneeling beside the stone while I walked past the old homestead and along the creek bank to the place where I had found the trench in the hillside. It was hard to see through the now-greening woods, but it looked as if the grave—or whatever it was meant to be—had been filled in. With dirt only, I hoped, and didn’t waste any time getting back to the cemetery to collect Ola on my way to the house. I had found her crying there with her arms wrapped around the stone angel.

  “She makes me uncomfortable,” my mother said. “This morning she asked if I’d mind if she broke off some dogwood blooms and a few blossoms from that early white azalea for Maggie’s grave. And of course I don’t mind! Maggie could have every flower on this farm—but it’s something I’d like to do myself.”

  I knew how she felt. Finding a comparative stranger weeping over my sister’s grave had annoyed me as well. This woman had only known Maggie for a few short months. She had no right to grieve as we did!

  I tried to think what Augusta would say. “Maybe it’s just something she has to get out of her system,” I said. “If it goes on, one of us needs to talk with her.”