Miss Dimple Suspects: A Mystery

by Mignon F. Ballard

  “Oh, that would be wonderful! And I’ll send more than a message. We just got a crate of fruit from my aunt in Florida. Do you think they might like some oranges and grapefruit?”

  Miss Dimple said she was certain that they would, and the next afternoon she climbed in the front seat beside Charlie, and with Annie in the back, the three started out for Mae Martha Hawthorne’s with ginger mint tea from Miss Dimple, yeast bread from Odessa, a large bag of citrus fruit and a letter from the Ashcrofts, and a crayon drawing of a smiling little girl in a blue coat from Peggy.

  “Do you think we should first stop at the nephew’s?” Miss Dimple asked as they came in sight of the weathered farmhouse at the foot of the hill. “I hesitate to just show up on someone’s doorstep, but I don’t see that we have any choice.”

  Annie spoke up from the backseat. “I don’t think it’s necessary. If they’re not in the mood for company, I guess they don’t have to let us in.” She sniffed. “But once they get a good whiff of Odessa’s bread, I’ll bet they’ll welcome us with open arms.”

  According to Charlie’s uncle Ed, Esau Ingram and his wife, Coralee, lived in the old family place and his brother had a small house near his blacksmith shop a little farther down the road.

  Charlie drove slowly along the rutted red dirt road that snaked its way up a hill where winter bare trees stood stark against a mottled background of brown. During her search for Peggy, Dimple Kilpatrick had walked a distance of several miles from the other side of those same hills. The rustic cottage where Mae Martha lived, she learned, had belonged to a family from Atlanta who used it as a weekend getaway, but the people lost interest in it when the father died, and after the place remained empty for several years, Mae Martha’s grandson convinced her to buy it to be closer to her relatives while he was away.

  “I thought we might see somebody outside when we passed Esau’s place,” Charlie said, avoiding a hole in the road that looked like it went down to China, “but it seems deserted around here.”

  “Wait, I believe there’s someone up ahead,” Miss Dimple said, and Charlie slowed as they came in sight of a stocky grizzled man with a rifle over his shoulder and a burlap sack in his hand.

  Charlie rolled down her window. “We’re on our way to visit Mrs. Hawthorne,” she told him. “Do you know if they’re at home?”

  The man glanced at them but didn’t slow in his walk. “They were there about an hour ago,” he said, swinging the sack by his side. “Don’t know where else they’d be.”

  Annie giggled as Charlie thanked him and drove on. “The strong, silent type. Wonder what he has in the sack.”

  “Probably a squirrel or two, or rabbits perhaps,” Miss Dimple answered. “That must be the man who does odd jobs for Mae Martha. I believe she said his name was Bill.”

  “Ugh! Creepy if you ask me,” Annie said. “I don’t think I could eat a squirrel, or a rabbit, either.”

  “You could if you were hungry,” Miss Dimple said, and had.

  * * *

  Max greeted them, first with barking, and then with wildly wagging tail when he recognized a friend, and Dimple stooped to pet him, calling him by name. The two women who lived here would surely know they had visitors by now, she thought, and looking up, saw Suzy glance at them from the kitchen window.

  “Why, it’s Dimple, isn’t it? And you’ve brought company. Come in, come in.” Mae Martha Hawthorne stood in the doorway with what looked like a man’s shirt over her dress and hugged herself in the cold.

  “I’m afraid we’ve interrupted your painting,” Dimple said, noticing splotches of color on the woman’s shirt.

  “Aw, I was fixing to quit anyhow.” Mae Martha paused to rub her right elbow. “These old bones are lettin’ me know I’m no spring chicken anymore. Would you all like some coffee? Bill brought me up some from the store just a little while ago and I think Suzy’s already put on a pot. Lordy, it’s good to have real coffee again!”

  Miss Dimple declined, but Charlie and Annie said they would love to have a cup, and would it be all right if they looked at some of her paintings?

  “Oh, law, go ahead. I just keep on paintin’ ’cause I don’t know when to stop,” Mae Martha said. “And a good thing, I reckon, because folks keep buyin’ ’em.”

  “Where is Suzy?” Dimple asked. “I was hoping to thank her, as well as you, for coming to our rescue the other night. I’ve brought some fruit from Peggy’s parents as well as a letter and some other things.” Miss Dimple looked about for Suzy but didn’t see her.

  “Oh, she’s here somewhere. She’s a funny one, that Suzy, but she was in here just a minute or so ago.” Mae Martha took the coffeepot from the kitchen stove and poured it into three mugs. It looked to Dimple exactly like the oil she’d seen her brother empty into his car. “Sure you won’t join us in a cup?” she asked Dimple. Dimple was sure.

  “Suzy!” Mae Martha bellowed. “Suzy! Where’ve you gotten off to now? We got some friends come to see us!”

  Dimple didn’t see how such a thundering voice could come from a woman so frail but was happy to see Mae Martha’s young companion step quietly from what she assumed was her bedroom. She relayed messages from Peggy’s grateful parents to both women, and although Suzy was courteous and thanked her for coming, she seemed uneasy in her presence.

  “Miss Dimple, you have to come and see these!” Charlie called from a doorway off the kitchen.

  “Oh, you must be Suzy,” she said, seeing the other woman had joined them. “I’m Charlie, and my friend Annie is in there trying to decide which of those wonderful paintings she likes best. I like all of them, but can only buy one … that is, if they’re for sale…”

  Mae Martha flushed and laced her fingers together. “Shoot! You all are gonna give me the big head. My nephew Isaac usually takes care of that kind of thing, but it doesn’t matter to me. You go on and pick out whichever ones you want and pay me what you can.”

  Miss Dimple turned to Suzy. “There must be a price list,” she said softly so that Mae Martha couldn’t hear, and Suzy smiled and shook her head. “There is one of sorts, but she has no idea of her talent,” she whispered. Everyone followed the artist into the room that obviously served as her studio, where several easels stood near the windows and a large table and several chairs took up one side of the room across from shelves cluttered with paints and brushes. Stacks of finished paintings lined the space that was left. The room had originally been used as a dining room, Mae Martha told them, but she chose it to paint in because it got the best light. Charlie had selected an oil painting of a man fishing from the banks of a small stream for her sister. “Our father loved to fish,” she explained. “I don’t think he ever caught a thing, but he didn’t seem to care.” She didn’t add that the father, for whom she was named, had died several years before.

  Miss Dimple chose one of two children picking blackberries. The little boy wore overalls such as her brother, Henry, had worn, and the girl, a purple dress with an apron smeared with berry juice. A sunbonnet much like the one young Dimple had worn hung down her back. The painting was priced at twenty-five dollars, which seemed an enormous amount to her, but over Mae Martha’s protests, she wrote a check for the full amount. What fun it would be to watch her brother open his Christmas present!

  Annie finally decided on a watercolor of people gathered outside a country church, and Mae Martha flatly refused to take more than ten dollars from either of the young women. “I know how hard it is on you young ones just startin’ out, and what Isaac doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she told them.

  Less than five minutes passed, it seemed, before Max began barking and Mae Martha’s nephew Esau turned up at the door along with his wife, Coralee.

  Coralee and Esau Ingram reminded Dimple of Jack Spratt and his wife of nursery rhyme fame. Wiry and thin, Esau lacked an inch or so of being as tall as his wife, while Coralee bulged in every place one could bulge, Dimple thought, and seemed out of breath from walking the short distance from the car
to the door.

  “Bill said he saw you folks headed this way, so I thought—well, Coralee and me—we thought you might like some of her sweet potato cake.”

  His aunt accepted the offering with thanks and introduced her visitors. “Miss Dimple here was the lady who found that poor little girl who got lost, but she tells me she’s doing a lot better. Got to have her tonsils out, though.

  “Law, Suzy, I’ll bet we’ve done let that fire die down!” Mae Martha turned to lead the way into the living room. “You folks come on in here and sit yourselves down.”

  “I wish we could, Auntie, but it looks like rain, and I’d better rush home and get the clothes off the line,” Coralee said.

  “Best be careful on this road coming down,” Esau added. “It’s hard to see up here after dark.”

  “I’d offer you some of this cake,” their hostess said after the couple had left, “but I doubt if it’s fit to eat. Coralee means well, bless her heart, but she either stints on the sugar or doesn’t bake it long enough.” To demonstrate, she gave the dish a shake. “See there—not even done in the middle!”

  “I guess we should be getting back,” Charlie said. “I don’t want to run off the road in the dark.”

  “Oh, don’t pay any mind to Esau!” Mae Martha poked up the fire. “Sit and visit a spell.”

  “Miss Dimple tells me you studied at Emory,” Annie said, turning to Suzy. “Is that where you got to know Mrs. Hawthorne’s grandson?”

  Suzy nodded. “Madison and I had several classes together.”

  “And lucky for me they did!” Mae Martha inched her chair closer to the fire. “I’d have been in a fix without her, especially now that Madison’s gone. Esau and Coralee—Isaac, too—they’re mighty good to me, but they’ve farms and a blacksmith shop to run, and when I was so sick last March, Madison didn’t like me being here alone. That was right before he shipped out.”

  “You must be very proud of him,” Miss Dimple said, and that was all Mae Martha needed to take a cigar box of letters down from the mantel. “I’d be a whole lot prouder if he was still alive,” she said. “His mama and daddy were taken with the typhoid fever when Madison was just a little thing and this is about all I have left.”

  While Mrs. Hawthorne shared her grandson’s correspondence with Dimple, Charlie and Annie had a chance to talk with Suzy, who had seemed reluctant to say much earlier. Now she wanted to know about their lives as teachers and Annie’s experience living in a boardinghouse, while they were curious about her life on a large university campus.

  “Do you ever get homesick?” Annie asked, and Suzy shook her head. She didn’t answer for a while, and when she did, her eyes held a faraway expression. “A little, I suppose,” she said, “but I was raised here in the States—in California.”

  Charlie frowned. “Don’t you ever have a chance to get out—to town, I mean, to see a picture or do some shopping?”

  “Oh, Esau and Coralee, and once in awhile Bill will bring me what I need when they go into town. I really don’t mind being here.”

  “Do you think Mae Martha would care if we came for you some Saturday? We could have lunch at the drugstore, look around in the shops, or just visit.” Annie kept her voice low so she wouldn’t offend Mae Martha.

  “Shoot! You don’t have to whisper around me,” that lady said. “Suzy knows she’s free to go where and when she likes. Max and I will be just fine, but I never learned to drive so I don’t have a car, and she has to depend on somebody else to give her a ride.”

  “I’m going to write down my phone number, and Annie’s and Miss Dimple’s, too,” Charlie said as they were getting ready to leave. “Now promise you’ll call one of us when you’re ready for the grand tour of Elderberry. And we’d love for both of you to come—that is, if you think you can stand the excitement.”

  Suzy accepted the piece of paper reluctantly. “I don’t want to impose—”

  “Oh, shush, girl!” Mae Martha told her. “I’m happy here with my paints and my dog, but you’re too young to be cooped up all the time.

  “She’ll be calling,” she said aside to Charlie as she followed them to the door. “You can count on it.”

  * * *

  “Suzy doesn’t seem especially eager to visit us in town,” Annie worried as they bumped their way back down the hill in the dark. “I’d think she’d be more than ready for a break.”

  “I know I would be,” Charlie agreed. “I hope she doesn’t think we’re trying to force her or anything. I like Mae Martha a lot, but I’d go crazy up there all the time.”

  Dimple Kilpatrick didn’t say a word, but she thought she knew what was troubling Suzy. And she’d noticed, too, that they had never heard her last name. Of course she was probably making an issue over nothing. She could almost hear her brother saying, Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dimple, don’t invent trouble where none exists!

  Dimple slowly began to relax as they drove into town. There would be salmon croquettes and applesauce for supper, with a good thick slice of Odessa’s yeast bread. Suzy was just shy. She would telephone in time and she and her new friends would have a nice time together in town.

  But when Suzy called a few days later, it wasn’t at all what she expected.

  “Miss Dimple, can you come? Something terrible has happened, and I don’t know what to do! Hurry, please! I need your help, and don’t—”

  And then the line went dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Why, Miss Dimple, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost! Is anything wrong?” A blast of cold air followed Annie as she slung her jacket on the coatrack and stood in the hallway, clutching a small bag from Lewellyn’s Drug Store.

  Miss Dimple replaced the telephone receiver thoughtfully. “It seems that’s what we’ll have to find out.” She hurried past Annie and shoved aside the lace curtain that covered the glass-paneled door. “Is Charlie with you? We’ll need a car.”

  “She stopped at the library, but I had papers to grade…” Annie quickly reclaimed her jacket and tossed her package on the hall table. The last time she had seen Dimple Kilpatrick display such urgency was when they learned little Peggy Ashcroft was missing. The papers would have to wait.

  While Dimple went upstairs for her wraps, Annie stuck her head in the kitchen to tell Odessa not to hold supper, as the two of them might be late.

  Odessa poured corn bread batter in a sizzling iron skillet and shoved it into the oven. “Where you got to go this late in the day?” she demanded. “It’s gonna be dark out there before long.”

  I wish I knew! Annie thought, but she promised they would be careful. “Save us a piece of that corn bread!” she added, hearing the older teacher’s rapid footsteps descending the stairs. According to Odessa Kirby, nothing good happened outside after dark because that was when “haints” were on the prowl, and you sure didn’t want to run into one of them. Annie didn’t think it was a “haint” that caused Miss Dimple’s consternation, but it must’ve been something just as critical.

  “Has something happened to Virginia?” Annie’s breathing came fast as she struggled to keep up with Dimple’s pace.

  Miss Dimple gripped her handbag in front of her as if the contents might come flying out as they rushed across Katherine Street on their way to the library. “It’s Suzy, Mae Martha’s young companion.… I just had the strangest call, and I’m very much afraid something’s terribly wrong!

  “Virginia generally closes at five. I hope we can catch them before they leave for home.”

  Annie waved to Marjorie Mote, who was hanging an evergreen wreath on her front door. “Is something the matter with Mae Martha? What did Suzy say?”

  “It’s what she didn’t say that alarms me. We were cut off before she could finish and I didn’t know how to call her back as they don’t have a telephone there.”

  “She was probably calling from the nephew’s house,” Annie suggested. “What’s his name? Esau? I wonder why she didn’t phone again.”

  “That’s w
hy I want to get there as soon as we can. The poor woman was almost hysterical—said something terrible had happened and she needed my help. I tried to call the operator to see if she could reconnect us, but Florence didn’t answer.”

  Probably chatting on another line or listening to someone else’s conversation, Annie thought. Florence McCrary, the local operator, admitted to being curious, but everybody knew she was just plain nosy.

  “Let’s hope Virginia has her car here,” Annie said as they crossed the stone bridge in the town park and hurried past the two magnolia trees that bordered the walkway to the library. “Charlie’s mother’s using theirs. She and Charlie’s aunt Lou drove out to visit a cousin somewhere in the country.”

  Charlie had admitted earlier that the two sisters had long delayed visiting their cousin Eva. Not only was she a tiresome hypochondriac, they knew she’d insist on sending them home with her awful fruitcake, but as the holidays drew nearer, they couldn’t put it off any longer. That afternoon, with a box of chocolates from Lewellyn’s and a fruit jar of Lou’s sherry-flavored boiled custard, the sisters had resigned themselves to an afternoon of listening to their cousin’s list of maladies.

  Charlie dropped the book she was holding the instant they stepped inside the building. “What’s wrong? Is it Mama and Aunt Lou? They haven’t had an accident, have they?” Hurrying to meet them, she reached for Annie’s hand and pulled her into the room, still warm from the dying fire and smelling of wood smoke. “You know how Mama gets distracted when those two are togeth—”

  Dimple Kilpatrick gave her a look that clearly read: Settle down at once! Charlie Carr had seen it often and had been on the receiving end more than once during her own experience in Miss Dimple’s first-grade classroom. “As far as I know, your mother is fine,” Dimple reassured her, “but I received a frantic telephone call from Mrs. Hawthorne’s companion this afternoon and she seems to be in some kind of trouble.