Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery (23 page)

“Like helping him kill his wife?” Blanche took another couple of steps away from Grace.

“You
have
been busy.” Grace took a couple of steps toward Blanche.

“Is that how you tied him to you? By helping him get rid of his wife?” Blanche took a step backward.

Grace guffawed. “Help him? That's hardly what happened. You've got it wrong.” Grace's voice had the same peeved yet triumphant tone she'd used when she'd first ushered Blanche past the gate into the house in town. “I always hated her, with her whiny voice and all that pretty hair. Always dimpling up to Daddy, stealing my...”

Blanche remembered what Nate had said about nasty rumors when Grace's young cousin drowned in the pond. She realized that she and Grace were talking about two different victims. Careful, she warned herself. “Your daddy liked your cousin better than you, didn't he?”

Bright red spots appeared high on Grace's cheeks. “No! No! I was Daddy's favorite, always. He...” She stopped in mid-sentence with the look on her face of someone who'd just waked to find herself in an unfamiliar room.

Her stillness was chilling. Blanche swallowed hard. “What about your husband? Were you his favorite, too? Or did you have to help him kill his first wife in order to get him?”

Grace looked startled but didn't speak. She seemed to be listening to or for something. The silence in the room was like gas building toward an explosion.

“I thought you didn't love him.” Blanche's voice was high and loud to her own ears. “Why did you kill his wife? You could have bought yourself some other man.”

“Because I hated her! Hated her!” Grace bent her knees and pounded on her thighs with tightly clenched fists. She shouted each word slowly and distinctly. “She was just like...”

“Your cousin grown up.” Blanche completed Grace's sentence, then recoiled from the woman just as she did from slugs and other slimy creatures. She held her face perfectly still, determined to show nothing of what she felt to this woman who had been mad and murderous even as a child. Keep the bitch talking and bragging, she cautioned herself, and hope Mumsfield and Archibald get their asses here in a hurry! She willed herself to relax. She could play this conversation, push enough of Grace's buttons to keep her fixated on herself, as opposed to what Blanche was sure she'd come for. “If you don't love him, why are you trying to protect him?” she challenged Grace.

“He wasn't even there!” Grace bellowed at the top of her voice. Flecks of foamy spittle collected in the corners of her mouth. Blanche took two more steps away from her.

“He didn't even know I'd killed her until after we were married.”

“So the alibi was really for yourself!”

Grace poked her chest out a little further. “A master stroke, if I say so myself. He was under suspicion for murdering Jeannette. I knew he would be. I supplied him with a badly needed alibi, thereby proving my undying devotion to him and providing an alibi for myself as well. Of course, he was happy to marry me when he found out about the money. It's the only way Everett can support himself. He didn't get a dime of Jeannette's money. Her family saw to that. I knew they would. By marrying me, he got access to a fresh supply of money. Not just mine, but Aunt Emmeline's as well. Everett needs a lot of money to be happy. We both do. I told him there was enough for both of
us.” She rolled her eyes and gave Blanche a conspiratorial look. “And they say it's sex that clouds men's minds!” Grace shook her head and smiled as though Everett and all his money-hungry brothers were just a bunch of devilish little tykes. She ran her hands through her hair in a way that was reminiscent of Everett.

“Where is he?” Blanche asked again.

Grace didn't answer immediately. When she did speak, it was not to answer Blanche's question. “A very useful, if greedy, man was Everett...but not a very intelligent man,” she added with a low chuckle. She tucked her blouse more firmly into her waistband and straightened her skirt. “Am I being redundant?” She gave Blanche a cold, speculative look. “Do you know what a redundancy is? I wonder.” Grace grinned a smug, derisive grin.

Blanche associated Grace's mocking smile with every white person who'd ever ridiculed her for what she was and was not. For a moment, her mouth went sour with the taste of ignorance. She'd look up “redundancy” the first chance she got. If she got a chance. In the meantime, she had no intention of letting Grace know that she had struck a nerve.

“Where is he?” she pressed.

“I'll get to that in due time,” Grace told her. “I'm enjoying this. After all, anything I tell you is bound to remain a secret, isn't it?”

The smile that accompanied this question was as cold as the dead of winter. Its meaning was quite plain and no surprise. I wonder what she thinks I'm going to be doing while she's trying to kill me? Blanche gave Grace a searching look. Grace had no obvious weapon and no place to hide one that Blanche could see. It was possible Grace didn't know which kitchen drawers held knives or other sharp instruments. But I know, Blanche thought. She wore the knowledge that she was a quick movement away from a meat cleaver like armor against Grace.

“Yes, a redundancy.” Grace picked up the thread of her monologue and told Blanche how she and Everett had drugged
Emmeline and left her tied to a cot in the basement. “She was quite comfortable,” Grace added, as if to demonstrate her familial concern. “It was his idea. It began when he found that woman.”

“You mean the look-alike?”

Grace affirmed Blanche's question with a flicker of her eyelids.

“Who is she, anyway?”

“That's none of your affair.” Grace gave her one of those employer-has-spoken looks to which demure silence was the only correct response.

“All this shit is my affair. You made sure of that when you killed Nate.”

Instead of answering Blanche's question, Grace outlined the plan Everett had put to her—drugging Emmeline and replacing her with the look-alike for the signing of the new will, then returning Emmeline to her bed later the same night. “I knew it wouldn't work, of course. I can't imagine how that fool convinced himself that sharp old bitch could actually be convinced she'd slept for a whole day or had forgotten it! But, of course, I had my own plan, and it worked beautifully!” Grace glowed with pride. “I dissolved the pills in her soup and Everett carried her to the basement. Then we closed the house and came down here with that woman.” Grace spoke in a one, two, three, that's-how-you-make-a-good-apple-pie voice that made Blanche queasy.

Grace was on the move again, pacing the kitchen in even, unhurried steps. Blanche matched her step for step. Grace picked up the salt shaker from the counter. “I found the hypodermic needle in Aunt's room months ago.” She put the salt shaker back on the counter so that it was precisely aligned with the pepper mill. “Dr. Pritchard left it behind. He never came looking for it.” Her voice registered her indignation at the doctor's carelessness.

“What was in the hypodermic?”

“Nothing!” Grace straightened a pot holder on its hook until it hung at the same angle as the pot holder on the corresponding
hook. “Just air.” She stared at Blanche as though daring her to comment.

“But didn't your husband suspect something? I mean, first his wife and then your aunt?”

There needed to be a word other than “smile” to describe the toothy leer on Grace's face. “He was too greedy to suspect anything, too self-serving. He had no more use for her. She'd cut his allowance.” The giggle that curled around Grace's words was almost girlish. “Anyway, I told him I'd loved him since childhood. The same drivel I told you. He believed everything I told him until...”

Blanche was aware of Grace's continued use of the past tense when she talked about Everett. She was also aware of how easily, and for what flimsy motives, Grace was prepared to kill. “Until what?” she wanted to know. “Where is he?”

Grace shrugged and tossed her head.

“Was the sheriff's death what made Everett stop believing you?”

“You know about the sheriff!” Grace's voice held the kind of surprise a parent shows when a young child does something precocious. “But you'll never guess how!” she laughed and actually paused, to give Blanche an opportunity to try to guess, which Blanche declined.

“With the one weapon I knew would work.” She ran her hands slowly down her sides and moved her hips with a sensuousness that surprised Blanche. She didn't think Grace had that much juice in her. Grace's retelling of how she'd convinced the sheriff to drive to Oman's Bluff was much like many other stories Blanche had heard from other women about how they'd made some man pay for walking around with his brain in his penis. Blanche had a few such stories of her own. Her familiarity with the weapon made the murderous account of this privileged, protected, so-called upper-class, and at least superficially uptight woman wielding the world's oldest weapon even more frightening, more chilling.

“It was as though he'd forgotten everything he knew about me,” Grace told her.

Yes, Blanche thought, that's always a part of it.

“I didn't let him know I was in the back seat until we were on the highway. He nearly jumped through the windshield when I popped up behind him. Oh, but that was nothing compared to his reaction when I laid my brassiere on his shoulder! He ran right off the road!” Grace's words were made almost unintelligible by her laughter. “I want to settle our problem in a way I hope you can't refuse, Sheriff,” Grace whispered in a soft voice full of the genteel Georgia accent that was normally only a ghost of a presence in her speech.

Blanche imagined the sheriff congratulating himself on his good fortune as his brain swelled to full attention in his clammy shorts.

“I wouldn't let him stop the car until we got to Oman's Bluff. And, of course, I kept out of his reach. I had no intention of letting him put his disgusting hands on me!” Grace shivered delicately at the very idea. “I told him I wanted things to be just right. I leaned over and whispered all the things we'd do to each other once we got to Oman's Bluff. You should have seen him! He kept turning his head to look at me, as if he wanted to make sure I wouldn't disappear. His eyes reminded me of a child seeing its first Christmas tree. He kept licking his lips until they were all shiny.” Grace shuddered and paused.

Blanche braced herself for this account of exactly what Grace had done next, while in another part of her mind, she had yet to believe she was actually standing here listening to the details of murders told to her by the person who'd committed them.

“It was really quite simple.” Grace might have been describing how she'd contrived a particularly elegant flower arrangement. “When he began to climb into the back seat, I picked up the wrench from the seat beside me and...” She made a sideways swiping motion once, then twice more. Each stroke was
accompanied by a deep, satisfied grunt. Blanche winced. She saw the sheriff slump, half his body hanging over the top of the front seat, like a doll tossed carelessly by a child. Grace's eyes gleamed.

“It's all gravel up there, you know, so I didn't have to worry about footprints. I simply drove the car to the edge, got out, and...” Grace made a long pushing gesture. Sinews stood out in her neck and arms as she pushed at the big car. But there was a great deal of strength in those arms, enough to cause the wheels of the car to turn slowly, the car to inch forward. Grace completed her pushing gesture with a breathy “Unhh.” Her lips were parted and seemed fuller; color enlivened her face.

“I don't believe you!” Blanche nearly shouted at Grace. “I think you're trying to protect Everett!”

“Him! That slug? Where would he get the courage?” Grace's voice was rising. “But he makes a perfect suspect, don't you think?” Her sly grin was back.

“So you put the sheriff's handcuffs in Everett's blanket chest.”

“You
are
a nosy one, aren't you? Not that it's going to do you any good.”

“I still don't believe you. Everett killed Nate and the sheriff.”

Blanche stirred Grace's irritation at having her exploits chalked up to Everett. She was even beyond responding to Blanche's use of his first name.

“Your friend Nate kept a very tidy place. Quite quaint, actually.”

Blanche's hands became fists. Her face and neck were suddenly hot. “Why did you kill him? He thought it was your husband he'd seen on the path to Oman's Bluff, not you. Isn't that what you planned?”

“Oman's Bluff?” Grace repeated, as though she'd never heard of the place. “It had nothing to do with Oman's Bluff. That jacket provides all the evidence the police will need that my husband killed the sheriff.

“It was that woman! How was I to know Nate would recognize her? They say you people always know one of your own, no
matter how light-skinned. But she was so white...Of course, I should have thought..He'd been here so long.”

The idea that all black people recognized each other, no matter how diluted their African blood, appealed to Blanche, but she was proof it wasn't so. It certainly hadn't occurred to her that there was any ancestral connection between her and that old drunk.

“But how did you know he recognized her?”

Grace gave her a you're-not-going-to-believe-this look. “Missy, I know it ain't none a my business, and 'scuse me for sayin' it, but that man of yourn is gonna git you in a heap a trouble,” she said in a broad and ridiculing imitation of Nate.

The thought of Nate losing his life because he had tried to help Grace made Blanche tingle and smart as though all of her limbs had been asleep. “What did you do to him?” Her lips stung with rage.

“I dropped my handbag,” Grace told her. “Of course, he rushed to pick it up. He never saw the wrench in my other hand, in the fold of my skirt. The same wrench...When he bent down...” Grace giggled.

Blanche flinched from the possibility that Nate had lived long enough to know that he was about to die for trying to help someone who'd never seen him as anything but a dog's midwife. The thought of Nate's last moments sent Blanche moving toward Grace with a swift determination that momentarily paralyzed Grace. Her eyes widened, but she couldn't seem to move. When she finally gathered the presence of mind to take a step away from Blanche, it was too late.