Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery (20 page)

“Well, you'll tell me when you're ready, I suppose.”

“I'll show you, Blanche. I'll get it right now, right now!” The back door banged shut behind him.

Blanche hardly paid him any mind. Her attention was already upstairs.

The guest room closet, when she opened it, was as empty as she'd expected it to be. Now she stood outside Emmeline's door trying to decide what to do. What if she was wrong and the old lady was inside? She'd undoubtedly complain to Grace about Blanche's knocking on her door. Blanche grasped the cool porcelain knob with its old rose pattern and turned the it slowly and firmly as far to the right as it would go and then all the way to the left. Locked. She hesitated a few more moments before Night Girl rescued her.

“Excuse me, ma'am.” She knocked gently at the door. “I know you don't want to be bothered, but I keep smelling something like wood smoke out here in the hall and I was wondering if... Ma'am? Ma'am?” Blanche knocked harder, but she got no answer and expected none.

She was right. The old girl had run off, and Everett and Grace had gone out looking for her. They had to. Everett didn't want the cops snooping around here for any reason. And neither of them wanted Emmeline found drunk in some roadside joint.

Blanche was back in the kitchen when the phone rang. “It's me, gal. Don't pretend you don't know who this is.” Emmeline's voice was badly slurred. It took Blanche a couple of seconds to figure out who she was. She held the receiver to her ear and waited.

“Now, you listen close. I want you to give Everett a message. Tell him I wrote a letter. It's got everything in it. Everything. I sent it to Archibald. I told him to open it if he don't hear from me by Friday. Tell him that!”

Blanche hung up the phone and put water in the kettle. When the water was ready, she made a pot of tea and settled down at the kitchen table to think. How could Emmeline have found out what Everett had done? Her windows looked out on the front of the house. Had she, too, seen Everett leaving the house the night of the sheriff's murder? Blanche squeezed a few drops of lemon into her tea. Whatever Emmeline knew, there was no reason for her to run off. She could simply have called Archibald and told him on the phone, or told him to come to see her here if she was frightened. There was a phone in her room. Was she brain damaged enough to pretend she'd written the letter as a way of forcing Everett to see that she got a couple of days of uninterrupted binging? It was a dangerous game to play. Even if there was a letter, having it read didn't mean Everett would be arrested and dragged off to jail.

Blanche remembered when the Holder boy had stabbed the fifteen-year-old son of a sharecropper on his granddaddy's place. The police had labeled it self-defense. The family lawyer—the man Blanche was working for at the time—had put the boy in a cushy psychiatric clinic for six months, until the publicity died down. Then the boy's mother had taken him off to ski in Switzerland and travel around Europe for a year. The newspapers implied that the sharecropper boy had made improper advances toward the Holder boy. Everyone who worked in the kitchens of the town knew it was likely to have been the other way round.

Blanche sipped her cooling tea and wondered if Everett thought his little speech had convinced her that Grace might make up stories about him, or whether he had other bits of evidence of Grace's insanity lined up. Maybe Blanche wasn't the only one who needed to be concerned about being framed. She tugged her panties into a more comfortable relationship to her crotch and carried her cup and the teapot to the sink. None of this thinking relieved her of her other tasks. She gathered her tools.

Since it was Wednesday, she went back upstairs to the linen closet and counted out clean sheets before going into Everett's room. The order she'd imposed on his room the day before had been buried beneath a fresh layer of discarded socks, shorts, and undershirts, damp towels, and shoes lying in the middle of the floor.

What am I looking for? she asked herself as she stirred the already jumbled contents of Everett's bureau drawers. She thought of looking around the room for something greatly out of place, but not much in this room seemed to have a place. The chair that had been by the window the last time she was in the room was now near the foot of the bed, in front of the blanket chest.

Blanche sat in the chair. She leaned forward and ran her finger along the ridge carved in the edge of the chest's lid. She didn't know what she expected to find inside, but what she found, beneath a blanket and a spare pillow, was a pair of handcuffs. She tried to picture Everett handcuffed to the bedposts while Grace gave him a good spanking, or vice versa. It didn't work either way. She turned the handcuffs over and over in her hands as if she expected their cool gray-blue metal to tell her whether or not they had belonged to the sheriff—or had been used in Nate's murder. Her hands felt suddenly cold, even though she was wearing rubber gloves. She quickly replaced the cuffs. It won't be long now, she told herself. Not long. She hurried through Everett's room and closed the door firmly behind her.

Before she changed the bed in Grace's room, she flipped through Grace's address book until she found an entry for Archibald. She used a sheet of Grace's monogrammed stationery to jot down his office and home numbers. She was careful to return the pen to exactly the spot where she'd found it. She gathered the sheets and carried them down to the laundry room. Maybe the best thing to do was to forget about the call and hope Archibald didn't hear from Emmeline on Friday. But what if the letter was a fake?

Mumsfield burst through the back door, his face tightly scrunched up in a grin. “Here it is, Blanche. This one is for you.” He carefully placed a blue-green rock dusted with rusty soil on the kitchen table. “There!” Blanche was sure she could feel the warmth from the smile he gave her. “Now we have him for always, Blanche.”

Blanche looked at the stone for a few minutes, then at Mumsfield. It was clear from his attitude that the rock was important, and she could see from the way he was beaming that he was pleased with himself for getting it and giving it to her. She cautioned herself to tread lightly. “Tell me about rocks,” she said.

Mumsfield seemed to grow half an inch taller while she watched. “Sure, Blanche. I will tell you about rocks. I understand rocks,” he told her. “Rocks have deep parts, Blanche. Nate told me.” He was looking at the rock on the table as he spoke. “Rocks hold things. Deep inside. Forever. Rocks remember. Rocks from Nate's place have Nate inside.” He picked up the rock and held it out to Blanche with both hands.

“Can't you feel Nate laughing, Blanche?” Mumsfield asked her once she'd taken the stone from him. “Can't you hear him, Blanche?” Mumsfield bent over, slapped his knee, and wagged his head from side to side in soundless imitation of Nate having a good laugh.

Lord! What a wonder this boy is, Blanche thought. She blinked back her tears and thanked him for bringing Nate back
to her. She made a mat for the rock from a folded paper towel and set it on the windowsill. “Where he can watch the garden grow,” she told Mumsfield.

They stood in front of the window for a minute or two, looking at the rock and the garden beyond. Earlier, Blanche had wondered about Nate's funeral and whether she'd be able to attend. Now she no longer cared about that ritual.

Mumsfield ended their memorial service with a question about the possibility of early lunch. Blanche cooked a pound of bacon and fixed him four of the world's largest bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. Mumsfield was just polishing them off with three glasses of milk when the delivery boy scratched at the back door. Mumsfield went upstairs to put on his red suspenders, then left to work on some truck or other at the garage down some road or other.

Blanche did the dishes and began sweeping the floor. Instead of dust or crumbs, each stroke of her broom seemed to stir up the chill that had settled in the house despite the warm day. It wasn't a welcoming cool that provides shelter from the heat, but a forlorn cold that made the sunny day feel washed out and working its way toward gray. She propped the broom against the refrigerator and called her kids. She spoke to her mother first.

“I talked to Miz Minnie just this morning,” Blanche's mother said. “She told me that attorney minister man is kin to them folks you're with.”

“Attorney who, Mama?”

“You know who I mean, girl! The one who's investigatin' the sheriff.”

“The state attorney general?”

“That's right, him.” Her tone congratulated Blanche on finally getting it right.

“He's kin to these folks?”

“Blanche, don't keep repeatin' everything I say like some kind of poll parrot! And don't go askin' me a lotta questions
about him. 'Cause he ain't had nothin' to do with them since his only child drowned in they pond.”

Blanche wondered if not talking to them included not taking their money. Of course, the attorney general might not be the person the sheriff had intended to bribe. If he was the person, he might not have known or cared where the sheriff was getting the money.

“Mama, ask Miz Minnie if the attorney general is in need of quick money.”

“ 'Course he is! You know how white folks what got money is about gettin' more money.”

“Well, ask her to find out if his need is any greater than usual, and if so, why.”

“I sure will be glad when you're outta them folks' house!”

Blanche reminded her mother of the yet-to-be-received income-tax check that was the key to her getaway. But she didn't mention her other reason for not being ready to leave.

“Shame about that man out there. Must be terrible to burn up like that.”

Blanche agreed but didn't elaborate. She was glad her mother didn't seem to want to dwell on it.

It was a few minutes after the children took over the phone before Blanche felt the warmth she'd been seeking when she called. To protect herself, she'd had to put the part of her that was connected to them behind a locked door in the back of her being, waiting for the time when she could be her full self again. Now she felt like a prisoner being allowed a moment of family. She had to stretch to reach across the gulf, to really be with them. She moaned with Taifa over having just missed winning first prize in the playground foot race. When Malik came on the line, she listened sympathetically and agreed—without undermining her mother's authority or condoning his occasional use of brute force—that his grandmother might not understand boys as well as she did girls.

When she hung up the phone, her goose bumps were gone, and while the house was no warmer, the cold didn't cut to her
marrow. She dialed Ardell. “It's me, Ardell. How you doin', girl?” Blanche eased herself onto a kitchen chair.

“I heard about Nate. It's a damned shame,” Ardell told her.

A few hours earlier, a remark like that would have sent Blanche into a firestorm of rage and tears. Now she calmly told Ardell what she thought had really happened.

“I'd like to see the fucker ten feet underground, myself,” Ardell told her. “But he ain't no cream puff, girl. Sounds to me like the boy's 'bout as crazy as you can get without frothing at the mouth!”

Blanche had expected Ardell to be worried by her determination to nail Everett. “You know how you get when you're real mad, girlfriend. You don't want to say anything that will get you in more trouble than you can handle.”

Blanche laughed. “Them diplomatic lessons you been takin' are paying off!”

“Well, you got to do what you got to do when you dealing with a prickly cactus, Blanche.”

“All right. But you know I can't walk away from this.”

And, of course, she did know. She also knew that the police were more likely to arrest Blanche than they were to even question Everett. As they talked, Blanche listened for the sound of the limousine and waited for the tingling of her scalp that would tell her someone was nearby.

“Do you think the letter is real?” Ardell asked when Blanche told her about Emmeline's threat. “Maybe she's just making it up so they'll let her party till Friday.”

“But she must know something dangerous, or the threat wouldn't mean anything, would it? Maybe I should tell Grace. It might keep Everett from killing Emmeline.” She didn't want anyone's blood but Everett's on her conscience.

“Miz Minnie says they're probably both deep in this,” Ardell told her. “You know Coreen's brother Samuel? Well, he has an old lodge buddy who lives in Atlanta. The buddy's next-door neighbor was working for Grace's people when Everett's wife died. She
says Grace told the police she was with Everett all evening and the whole night. But she wasn't. This woman who was working in the house says she was just closing the door to the servants' stairs, on her way up to her room, around ten o'clock, when she saw Grace leave her bedroom. She said Grace was real pale but not hysterical or crying or anything. She hurried down the stairs like she didn't want nobody to see her. Of course, didn't nobody official ever ask the woman what she'd seen, so she never told nobody official.”

“That means Grace lied. He didn't really have an alibi.”

“Oh, and that's not all. Your man Everett was seen by somebody other than you and Nate on the night the sheriff died. Miz Minnie's been talking your interest in these folks around. I got a call from Bennie Jackson, who drives a cab. He said he picked Everett up at the family's place in Farleigh and took him to the Bide-Away Motel out on Route Nine.”

Blanche didn't need to ask the purpose of Everett's visit. The Bide-Away was a hangout for local prostitutes. Legitimate white motel-room seekers were sent to the Sleep-Well Motel, just down the road and owned by the same bunch of Farleigh businessmen. Of course, black inquirers and those with foreign accents were told both motels were full. Many of the Bide-Away's customers preferred to take a cab to and from the motel, particularly if their cars were distinctive ones. The motel parking lot fronted right on the highway.

“What time did Bennie drop him off?”

“After midnight. The paper said the sheriff died about three
A.M
. Plenty of time for Everett to get laid, leave, and go kill the sheriff,” Ardell said. “I asked Bennie to check around and see if he could find out who took that sucker back home.”