Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery (18 page)

“No one knows, of course,” she went on. “Not even Mumsfield. We've managed to keep it from him, somehow. If only she would stop, or at least cut down. Now she's up there snoring and drooling and...”

Unlike the last time Grace had attempted to confide in her, Blanche was as interested in getting into Grace's business as
Grace seemed to be in telling it. She was tempted to launch into a full-fledged lay-it-on-my-bosom number, complete with wet eyes and hand-patting, but that role was too familiar for a Mistress of the Manor type like Grace. Instead Blanche let her arms fall to her sides and was attentively silent. Her head slightly bowed, she waited for her employer to bestow the privilege of confidence.

“Are you married, Blanche?”

Blanche raised her head. “Yes, ma'am,” she lied.

“Any children?”

“No, ma'am.” She didn't want even the knowledge of her kids in this house. “That man is more than enough child for me.” She gave Grace a version of that pained, puzzled, and indignant look which is part of all women's male vocabulary.

Grace sighed, propped her elbows on the table, and rested her head on her hands, as though she couldn't bear the weight of her own thoughts.

“He's not really insensitive, you know.” She raised her head and looked at Blanche. “He's really quite kind, quite caring. It's just that he doesn't understand how difficult it is. She's not an easy person.” She sighed deeply. “But then, neither is Everett, sometimes...But Aunt Emmeline is wrong about him. He wouldn't!” Grace jumped as though she'd been pinched.

“What did your aunt say?” Blanche kept her voice as neutral as possible.

Grace stood up. “I'm talking too much.” She put a fist on either side of her head, as though to keep its halves in place. “And my head is splitting.” She hurried out of the room.

Blanche slumped against the sink. She was conscious of the dampness under her arms and in her crotch. She chided herself for having frightened Grace off. She'd known her question was a risk, but she thought Grace was close enough to hysteria to be prompted. Too bad. But she'd be back. Blanche was sure of it. She tried to imagine what Emmeline could have told Grace about Everett and how she could possibly know anything, sitting up
there drunk in her room. For a moment, Blanche let herself feel what it must be like to be Grace right now, knowing, or at least suspecting, that her husband was a murderer. Not only was he a killer, but she had lousy taste in men. But from what Ardell had said, maybe Grace had married him knowing he was a murderer. Her lips curled into a wry smile at the idea that Grace was a woman who believed she could change a man by marrying him taken to the extreme. She finished washing Emmeline's dishes and put the tray away.

She wanted to go to bed. She was as tired as if she'd been doing stoop labor all day. But she was chock-full of other people, too, as though Emmeline, Mumsfield, Everett, and Grace had taken possession of her person, with their commands, needs, questions, and fears. She would likely choke on them if she lay down. She opened the back door and stepped outside. Immediately she was wrapped in an eastern Carolina night, moist and gentle, loud with creatures' songs and the whisper of the pines. Blanche sunk down on the doorstep and released her unwelcome inhabitants in a series of deep, slow sighs. She rose, went back in the kitchen, and turned the lights off. Back outside, she let her Night Girl self slip down the yard to walk slowly between the two halves of the vegetable garden, carrots and corn on one side, tomatoes and peas on the other. The cabbage leaves were delicate fans quivering on the bit of breeze that kept the night from being muggy. She felt the darkness drifting down from the sky, passing through her pores, into her bloodstream, her bones, and her heart. She breathed deeply, hastening the night's penetration. She smiled at the return of the childhood Night Girl feeling that she could leap as high as the housetops, if she chose, or even ride the stars, as Cousin Murphy had said.

In this state, her brain was suddenly cleared of all the little bits of worry and commentary that interfered with her ability to latch on to a thought. She stood away from herself and looked at where she was. My whole life could depend on what happens in
this house, she thought. She turned to look at the house behind her. It seemed to Blanche to have a kind of worried air, as though it knew that murder had been done by one of its inhabitants. She knew who the murderer was and had some idea of why he'd killed. She could see that this knowledge was dangerous to her, even though no one else seemed to think the sheriff had been murdered. Except Nate. She wondered why he hadn't come back to finish their conversation.

Maybe he's gone to the police, she thought in the part of herself that was prone to pessimism and panic. But her mind was still filled with the night, which brooked no nonsense. Nate hadn't lived to be an old black man by going to the police and accusing high-toned white men of murder.

“Nate,” she whispered softly. She laid her open hand on the door of the potting shed. Her fingers, the wood, and the night formed a pattern in shades of darkness. She turned and walked back to the stoop and sat down. I'll wait a bit, she decided. He might still drop by.

TEN

S
he might have slept on the back stoop all night if a mosquito with a stinger as thick as a broom handle hadn't attacked her elbow. She shuffled off to bed to save her skin.

She woke to the memory of a noise in the night. Loud. High-pitched. A train whistle? Car brakes? A scream? She flung back the sheet and the thin blue blanket and planted her feet firmly on the chilly linoleum.

Something had changed. She could feel it the moment she stepped outside her bedroom door. At first, she thought the house had been broken into and its privacy shattered. But she saw nothing out of place as she tiptoed down the second-floor hall. She listened at all the bedroom doors and heard nothing, and nothing looked amiss. Yet, something had happened. When she'd first arrived, the house had had a timid kind of feeling, like a dog who'd been kicked too many times. When she'd looked at the house from out back last night, it had seemed worried. Now the house seemed to have somehow divorced itself from the household as surely as if a lawyer had served papers.

“What is it, Blanche?” Mumsfield was waiting in the kitchen, sitting very still, his hands folded on the edge of the table.

“I don't know, Mumsfield, honey.” She wasn't at all surprised that he should feel it, too.

She crossed the room and turned on the green plastic radio on the windowsill. She drummed her fingers on the counter and shifted from foot to foot while some good ole boy invited everybody to come on down and be rooked at his used-car lot, and a
woman with a husky voice tried to sell seaside condos by implying they came with a year's supply of pussy. Blanche reached for a knife and began halving oranges for juice. The station segued into national news. It was after the national news that a young man trying to suppress his Southern accent told her that the noise she'd heard in the night was a fire engine on its way to “the fatal fire at the cabin of Nate Taylor, near Oman's Bluff—the site of another tragic death recently.”

Mumsfield began softly sobbing into his cupped hands. His body rocked slowly from side to side. Blanche remained dry-eyed, although her body was momentarily doused in pain, as Nate's must have been until the flames ate him.

She turned off the radio when the reporter moved on to talk about the mayor's meeting with representatives of the Beautify Our City Committee. For a second, she let herself pretend that it was some other Nate, near some other Oman's Bluff. It was just too damned much! It wasn't enough that the man had been treated like a machine, robbed of respect, and kept poor all of his life. It wasn't enough that his time had been owned by other people who also decided how high he could raise his eyes and his voice, and where he could live and how. He also had to be murdered over some white people's shit that didn't have a damned thing to do with him.

A thick, hot rage began to roil in her stomach at the thought of the deaths of all the poor black Nates and, yes, Blanches at the hands of the privileged white Everetts of the world. Nowadays, people wanted to tell you class didn't exist and color didn't matter anymore. Look at Miss America and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Miss America and the chairman were no more black people than Mother Teresa was white people. Men like Nate and women like her were the people, the folks, the mud from which the rest were made. It was their hands and blood and sweat that had built everything, from the North Carolina governor's mansion to the first stoplight. They ought to have
been appreciated for being the wattle that held the walls together. Instead, they were expendable, interchangeable, rarely missed, hardly regarded, easily forgotten. Not this time! There was no question in her mind that Everett had killed Nate, no matter what they said on the radio.

Why hadn't she expected this to happen? Or had she? If she'd acted on last night's concern for Nate's whereabouts, instead of hanging around the back stoop hoping he'd show up, maybe he'd still be alive. I could’ve tried to find his place last night, or looked for him earlier, she told herself. If she'd found him and added what she suspected to what he already knew, she was sure he'd have understood the danger and gone away for a while, as black people in the South have always been forced to do when they come to the attention of the wrong white person. Tears gathered as she pictured Nate off somewhere safe, making himself a new garden that was all his own. Her tears made dark blotches on the front of her gray uniform.

“Don't cry, Blanche. Don't cry.” Mumsfield's voice was choked by his own tears. He knelt in front of her, reached out, hesitated, then awkwardly patted her hand.

“Everyone has to die, Blanche.”

Blanche smiled a wry smile. He was a good pupil. But the fact that we've all got to die sure as hell don't give nobody the right to kill you, she thought. She patted Mumsfield's hand, each of them now trying to comfort the other.

The man on the radio had said the fire department suspected Nate of falling asleep while smoking. Blanche was very sensitive to smoke. When she'd been with Nate, she'd never picked up even a whiff of the telltale odor all smokers carry in their clothes and hair.

Only a crazy person keeps killing people and killing people, she thought, and realized she had no reason to think Everett wasn't crazy. He was a rich white male. Being in possession of that particular set of characteristics meant a person could do
pretty much anything he wanted to do, to pretty much anybody he chose—like an untrained dog chewing and shitting all over the place. Blanche was sure having all that power made many men crazy. And, according to Ardell, Everett had already exercised his privilege in the most lethal of ways once before. She thought about yesterday, when Everett had questioned her about her conversation with Nate. Everett had sniffed around her answers like a hunting dog with the scent of possum in its nose.

“I need to get away from here!”

“No, Blanche! No! Please don't leave, Blanche, please.” Mumsfield gripped her hand.

Blanche gave him a sad smile. It was too bad he was related to these people, too bad he wasn't black or at least on her side of the household. Too bad she couldn't tell him that despite her outburst, he needn't worry about her leaving—not until she saw to it that something awful happened to his cousin Everett.

“I better start breakfast.”

“You won't leave Mumsfield, will you, Blanche?”

“Not without telling you, Mumsfield, honey.” She hoped she was telling the truth. She took her hand back and rose from the chair.

While she cooked, Mumsfield sat watching her move from refrigerator to sink to stove and back again. Ordinarily, having someone hanging around the kitchen watching her cook would have irritated her. Today, there was comfort in their shared grief. It was likely to be the last time she would talk with him and be with him just drylongso. He was a member of Everett's family. She would have to treat him as someone with more interest in saving Everett than in avenging Nate's murder. She felt very alone but not saddened by it. The fiery rage in her belly and the ice encasing her heart made her unfit for human companionship. Only Everett's long and miserable imprisonment or his death could return her to normal. “He will not get away with this,” she mouthed soundlessly while swirling butter in a sauté pan. “He will not!”

Mumsfield helped her set the table. While she finished the eggs, he carried the tray of grapefruit halves and orange juice into the dining room, then went to fetch Everett and Grace.

Everett entered the dining room first. His back was so stiff it might have been in a brace. Grace followed him. Her eyes were riveted on the back of his head. The two of them seemed to move in tandem, caught at opposite ends of a taut rubber band that twanged with tension.

Blanche arranged the food on the sideboard. She pushed away the fantasy of dashing the food, and everything else she could lay her hands on, into Everett's smug face—scalding coffee, thick, stick-to-the-skin grits. She took a deep breath, relaxed her shoulders, and listened for what would be said once Mumsfield blurted out what he'd just heard on the kitchen radio. But Mumsfield was silent. Blanche looked over her shoulder. He had launched into his grapefruit with the same single-mindedness he brought to all other tasks. A time to mourn and a time to eat breakfast, she thought, and recognized the naturalness of Mumsfield's world, in which mourning had nothing to do with eating. The body didn't stop needing nourishment because the heart was broken; the living had to live. It was a philosophy she was sure Nate would have appreciated. She readied herself for closer contact with Everett.