Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery (22 page)

“Oh, baby, I'm so sorry.”

“But where is Aunt Emmeline, Blanche? Mumsfield is...I am so worried about her.” The tears he'd been trying to hold in came spilling down his cheeks.

“I don't know where she is, Mumsfield.” It was only a partial lie. Now that she knew about the switch, she was almost sure Emmeline was dead, probably in the cellar in the house in town. Why else would they lock the door to the cellar when Mumsfield said the freezer and washing machine were kept down there? Blanche felt sick from having lived among these people.

“What exactly did you hear your cousins saying?” she asked him.

Mumsfield's face fell into the stony, speaking-in-tongues expression he always wore when he imitated people. The voice
that now came out of his mouth was pure Grace, only this was the voice of a Grace whom Blanche had never seen, a Grace so angry her words sizzled.

“I told you she'd be more trouble than she's worth. But you insisted. Now she's out there staggering around the countryside about to...”

Mumsfield's voice slipped into a lower register and became Everett. “She won't get far.”

“It doesn't matter how far she gets. What matters is who she meets, who she talks to,” came the reply from Grace.

“Remember, Grace, she can't give us away without giving herself away as well. She won't talk.”

“Perhaps not while she's sober. But how long do you think that will last?”

“It's too late to go over that. We'll look for her after breakfast,” was Everett's reply.

Mumsfield paused and took a deep breath. When he spoke again it was in his own voice. “Is she dead, Blanche?”

Blanche watched him closely, not knowing quite what to expect. “I don't know for sure, Mumsfield, but we've got to find out.”

“Yes, Blanche.” He dried his eyes.

She took Archibald's phone numbers from her apron pocket. He was the one who'd accepted the phony Emmeline's signature. He had some stake in this, too. Her only other choice was to call the police. The idea of voluntarily putting herself in the hands of the sheriff's office didn't warrant a moment's thought. She went to the phone and dialed.

When the receptionist had finished turning the names of the partners in Archibald's law firm into a meaningless string of sounds, Blanche asked for Mr. Archibald Symington and was passed on to a more precise voice. This voice told her Archibald would be in conference for the rest of the day.

“Please tell him Miz Emmeline Carter would like to see him at her country place at his earliest possible convenience,” Blanche
told the woman on the phone. “And she asks that he please bring the letter she recently sent him.”

The precise voice developed a coat of ice when Blanche asked her to repeat the message, but she'd been too well trained to take orders not to do it.

The woman who answered the phone at the second number, which Blanche assumed was Archibald's home number, was more interested in who Blanche was than in giving out information on when Archibald was expected to return. Blanche left the same message and hung up.

Now she could only wait. It was a hard prescription. Waiting for some prime-aged white man to show up and set things right had the ring of guaranteed failure. She sank slowly onto the chair across from Mumsfield.

Mumsfield moved his glass around on the table. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I'm scared, Blanche.” He let go of his glass and stretched his damp, chilly fingers out toward her. Blanche gave his hands a squeeze.

“Me, too,” she told him. “But we can't just sit here with our knees knocking. You gotta go get Archibald,” she told him. “Those people in his office ain't paying me no mind.”

Blanche fetched the phone book, looked up Archibald's office address, and wrote it down on half the sheet of paper she'd taken from Grace's room. “Here.” She handed the paper to Mumsfield. “Anybody in town can tell you how to get there.”

Mumsfield fidgeted in his chair. He shook his head from side to side.

“You want to know where your Aunt Emmeline is, don't you? You want to find out what happened to Nate, don't you?”

“Nate?” he asked.

“Somebody killed him.” She watched his eyes widen.

“I can get a ride from the gas station,” he told her. Blanche gave him a hug.

“But you mustn't talk to anyone else about it.” He nodded his head in response. “And when you get there, make them take you right to Archibald, no matter where he is. Can you do that?”

Mumsfield began rocking from side to side. He swung his arms back and forth as he swayed. “I must see Cousin Archibald, now. Now! I must see Cousin Archibald, now. Now!” he chanted over and over, faster and faster. He looked as though he were on the verge of flying to pieces. Blanche wondered if she'd taxed him too much.

Just as abruptly as he'd begun, he stopped. “Like that?” he asked and gave her a mischievous grin. Blanche was truly impressed. She went with him to the front of the house and opened the door for him. She watched him walk down the drive and stared her growing affection for him in the face. She didn't like what she saw. But she knew it was useless to deny it. She believed that every person was unique. She also believed some people were more obviously special than others. And Mumsfield was very special, at least to her. She didn't know if he was able to connect with other people the way he did with her, but each time they talked, she came away feeling that if they just had the time, they could learn to talk without words.

For all his specialness and their seeming connectedness, Mumsfield was still a white man. She didn't want to shower concern on someone whose ancestors had most likely bought and sold her ancestors as though they were shoes or machines. Would she always find some reason—mental challenge, blindness, sheer incompetence—to nurture people who had been raised to believe she had no other purpose in life than to be their “girl”? Had the slavers stamped mammyism into her genes when they raped her great-grandmothers? If they had, she was determined to prove the power of will over blood. When Mumsfield was out of sight, she slowly closed the door and thought about her next move. Given what a sly boots Grace had turned out to be, Blanche decided to give her room a more thorough search.

She began with Grace's closet—a study in organization—and slipped her hand beneath and among drawers full of panties and bras, all in the same heavy cream-colored silk. She patted nightgowns and probed stacks of slips until she had only one more drawer to search.

When she opened the last drawer, a hint of Grace's floral perfume scented the air. Neatly folded scarves rested upon one another like banked, multicolored clouds. Blanche gently lifted a few of them and held them lightly in her left hand. She wormed her right hand through the scarves to the bottom and back of the drawer. She found only more scarves. One of them managed to become snagged on the cuff of her rubber glove.

It was a large silk square, with a cream background and big pink and mauve flowers with dusky-green leaves, like overblown gardenias. It was at the same time exotic and Victorian. Blanche complimented Grace on her choice. She folded the scarf so that a subtle pink blossom was centered on top. The color caught Blanche's attention and held her eyes. It reminded her of something she'd been trying to remember. Something about the night Nate was murdered. Something...

Everett sneaking the limo down the drive. She saw him clearly as the car moved slowly away from the house. His arm on the window ledge was blue-white in the moonlight. Blue-white. She stared down at the scarf in her hands. Her body understood what this meant long before her brain patched the truth together. She remembered the creases in the sleeves of the pink jacket, turned back to accommodate shorter arms. She shivered. The front door slammed with a bang. Blanche dropped the scarf and headed for the back stairs.

Grace was in the kitchen, leaning weakly against the wall. For the first time, Blanche noticed that Grace's eyes didn't match. One eye—the right—was almost almond-shaped, but her left eye was round and unwavering as a blue marble. Grace began to whimper. But there were no tears in her left eye. Her hair was full
of twigs and bits of leaves. There were scratches, like strips of raw meat, on her face and neck. She was holding her right elbow in her left hand, as though she was hurt. Dirt and twigs stuck to her skirt and blouse. “What happened?” Blanche asked her.

Grace's face twisted as though the question caused her pain. She pushed herself away from the wall. She limped to the table, leaned heavily on it, then sank slowly into a chair. “What happened?” Blanche asked her once again.

Grace shook back her hair in one of those white-girl gestures that used to wrench Blanche's heart, when she was young and sure that being nappy-headed was a hindrance to being beautiful. Now she recognized the gesture as a play for time.

“He...he said he was going to kill us both. He was crazy, babbling....He said it was the only way. I grabbed the wheel.... Oh, God!” She looked up wildly at Blanche. There were tears in both eyes now. Blanche took a step back from the table. “It was so awful. I was so frightened. I can't tell you how frightened I was!”

Blanche felt like someone who'd been tricked by a red spade. She'd been too busy looking down on Grace to notice those eyes. And how had she allowed herself to believe that a person bent on unseen murder in the dark would wear a pink jacket—unless it was meant to be seen by a witness? But then, why kill the witness? As a person whose living depended on her ability to read character, Blanche was both shocked and frightened. She couldn't survive with muddled wits.

“I've injured my arm.” Grace held her arm out for Blanche's inspection. Blanche knew she was expected to go to Grace, to make soothing sounds and call on the Lord for protection and mercy while she fluttered about, gathering first-aid items and insisting she be allowed to call the doctor and the police. It was the combination of her memory of Everett's pale arm resting on the car window ledge and Grace's unwavering left eye that made her step back instead.

“You killed Nate.” The accusation jumped unbidden from Blanche's mouth with calm certainty.

“Please,” Grace moaned. “My arm.” Once again she held her arm out to Blanche. Blanche neither moved nor spoke. She stared directly into Grace's eyes. After a few moments, Grace chuckled and relaxed against the back of the chair. She let her arm fall gracefully to the table. A tight-lipped, bittersweet smile played across her mouth. She looked like somebody who'd just lost a poker game she'd thought was all tied up.

“You did kill him, didn't you? You might as well tell me. You're planning to kill me anyway. Me and the boy. You going to burn this house down, too?” Both anger and fear were present in her voice.

“You surprise me.”

Blanche knew exactly what Grace meant. As far as the Graces of the world were concerned, hired hands didn't think, weren't curious, or observant, or capable of drawing even the most obvious conclusions. When would they learn? “Why did you kill him?”

“Nate.” Grace shrugged as if she couldn't think of a subject more boring.

Blanche clenched her teeth against the urge to call her a murderous bitch. It was information, not a fight, that she was after. Was it true that murderers liked to brag about what they'd done? “Well, you sure had me fooled,” she told Grace.

Grace smiled, but she didn't start talking. Blanche primed the pump. “Of course, Nate wasn't the only one. Where's the real Emmeline?”

Grace rose from the table.
“Miss
Emmeline,” she corrected. She moved around the room touching everything she passed: chair, canister, table, curtain, door, stove, counter, as though she were taking inventory.

“She needn't have been so difficult.” Grace might have been talking about a child who'd refused to finish lunch. She circled the table and approached Blanche. As she inched along, she
continued to touch items in the room—the same items, Blanche thought, that she'd fingered before. Blanche moved with her so that the distance between them never narrowed. Grace stopped when she came parallel to the sink. “She should have listened, tried to understand how important it was to me to...” Grace's words trailed off as she stared at the sink.

“To have Mumsfield's money?” Blanche took no care to keep her feelings out of her voice.

Grace turned scornful eyes on her. “It's not
his
money. It's my family's money! My great-granddaddy...” She turned toward the sink. “I was her closest relative. Her closest
normal
relative, at any rate. Just how did she think it would look?” There was fire in her voice. She turned the handles of the hot and cold water taps, tested the water temperature, and fiddled with the knobs until she was satisfied. She picked up the bottle of dishwashing liquid and stared at the print on the back of it. She poured about a teaspoon-fill of the pearly white liquid into her left palm, added some water, and seemed totally absorbed in watching the suds grow thick and creamy between her hands.

“You killed your aunt when you and Mumsfield went into town to church. That's why you wouldn't let him go into the house, isn't it?”

“I told him she had a heart attack while I was with her in the cellar. The jackass believed me!” Grace washed the dabs of mud and bits of grass from her arms and hands.

“You mean your husband?”

“I really made you believe I loved him, didn't I?” She threw back her head and opened her mouth wide to let out a brash, blaring laugh that startled Blanche. “Oh, he's been useful. Like a veil, a bit of camouflage. But love that fool?” She belted out another brassy laugh.

“Why'd you marry him if you think he's such a fool?”

“I told you. He was useful.” Grace reached over and ripped a handful of paper towels from the roll hanging on the wall. “It was
cruel of Daddy to leave me money only if I married. He wanted me to have a keeper, someone to...watch me.” She thoroughly dried her hands, then used the towels to brush the dust and twigs from her clothes and shoes.

“But I found someone who wouldn't...There are more ways to tie a man to you than sex and children.” She examined her hands closely, turning them this way and that, checking the nails, pushing at a cuticle.