Doing It at the Dixie Dew (10 page)

Ida Plum stopped by to say she was going to visit her sister in Weaverville for a day or two.

“I didn't know you had a sister,” I said. “You've never mentioned her.”

“You just weren't listening. Of course I've mentioned my sister, Ida Clair. Many times, many times.” Ida Plum wore deep blue slacks and a lavender pullover. She had a purple bow in her hair. As she left the porch, I caught sight of her purple sling-back pumps.

Since when did one wear bows to visit a sister? If such a sister really existed. And sling-back pumps? Must be a classy sister, I thought. Those sure looked like three-hundred-dollar shoes to me.

As I took the third batch of muffins from the oven, there was a tap on the back-door glass. I opened it to Malinda, who said, “I trust my nose and follow it.” She helped herself to one of the warm muffins, breaking it open as she winked at me. “What's new in the trade?”

“Nobody. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero. But I ain't complaining and see, I'm still swimming in hope. Fix up the old home place and guests will come.”

“If you say so,” Malinda said. She wrapped another muffin in a paper napkin and put it in the pocket of her smock. “This baby is my three o'clock snack and Lord-help-me-make-it-to-five.” She slipped out the back door. “See you around.”

A dozen times it had been on the tip of my tongue to tell her about the note. And something stopped me. I didn't know what. Maybe I thought it sounded so juvenile. So Nancy Drew. And yet every time I thought of it, I got goose bumps. Nobody in this world had a grudge against my grandmother. Nobody.

It was after four when Scott got back. He'd rented a wallpaper steamer to use on the hall walls. I worried we'd have to peel and scrape for days.

I had no guests, nor inquiries from any, but then it was only Monday. Things would probably pick up toward the weekend.

When he asked about Ida Plum and I told him she was visiting her sister, Ida Clair, he stopped unwinding the steamer cord and laughed so hard he bent double.

“What?” I asked. “What's so funny?”

“Don't you remember that old Knock Knock joke about who's there and the answer is ‘Ida Clair'? ‘Ida Clair who?' ‘Ida Clair I'm from the South; who are you?”

“Okay,” I said, “but that still doesn't tell me anything. And she was dressed up. A bow in her hair and heels!”

He laughed some more, slapped his side. “She really did it. She's taking the tour.”

“Tour?”

“Yadkin Valley vineyard tour. It's a day thing. I gave her the flyer. Just didn't think she'd take me up on it. The wine tasting and all. Good for her. Maybe she'll meet somebody. One can get lonely, you know.”

Before I could answer he started the steamer. Somehow I never thought of Ida Plum as lonely. Scott, either. Maybe I had gone around too long thinking I owned the rights to the condition.

Scott and I worked with the steamer until after midnight. There were six layers of wallpaper that ranged from bamboo to roses, the bamboo being the oldest and hardest to remove. “Remind me never to plant any of this stuff,” Scott said. “I've seen enough to last a lifetime.”

“Think how the kudzu would give it a run for the space,” I said. “You know the old story about if you plant kudzu in the rear of your yard it will beat you back to the house.”

Scott laughed as he left.

A few minutes later I let Sherman in the front door. I started to lock the door when I saw a huge van careen around the corner and down the street. A do-it-yourself rental type of moving van, going much too fast, and where on earth did moving vans go at this time of night? I watched as it passed and gunned down the street. I thought the determined driver looked a little like Father Roderick's housekeeper.

But what was Father Roderick's housekeeper doing driving a moving van? Ida Plum had said she'd been someone he took in and gave a job to. She probably didn't own more than the clothes on her back. Odd. But I could have sworn that was his housekeeper driving hell-bent for somewhere behind the wheel of that truck. It was her or someone who looked enough like her to be her twin sister. Two of those women in this world would be tough to take, I thought, and I didn't know why I thought that. Just a feeling. I really didn't know why the woman bothered me. But something about her bothered me a lot.

Chapter Ten

I hated lawyers' offices, even Ethan Drummond's old wood-paneled, pine-smelling, green rubber-tiled reception room. It looked like it had the first day he'd opened the practice with a green plastic sofa, two boxy brown plastic chairs, plastic plants and magazines no one but a lawyer would read, except a three-year-old issue of
Country Music,
which Scott started thumbing through.

The door to the inner office was closed, but behind its milky pebbled-glass pane I saw shadows, heard voices. Heyman bellowed something about this “Hicksville of a town” and “chicken shed police department.” Scott lifted one eyebrow, grinned at me. “What are we doing here?”

Someone peered from the hall into the reception room, then eased himself into a chair closest to the door. Mr. Mumble Mumble Polyester, I remembered, Miss Lavinia's cousin. He perched on the edge of the chair as if he wanted a head start should an occasion call for him to jump and run. He acknowledged me and Scott with a quick bob of his head, looked behind him as though someone might be following, then waited, holding his tan pancake of a hat over one knee of those god-awful green plaid polyester pants.

I listened as Ethan Drummond's easy tones seemed to calm Kingswood Heyman down. Ethan was used to charming juries, judges, the city council, hostile witnesses, church elders … anybody who sat before him. He and his wife, Miss Grace, had been friends with Mama Alice for as long as I could remember. They'd treated me like a daughter, always remembered my birthdays, Christmases … every occasion. They thought me and Ethan Clay, their son, would marry. We would go up to the university together after high school. He'd finish law school, pass the bar, we'd get married, come back to Littleboro to live, and Clay would take over his father's practice. But it hadn't worked that way. Clay had gone to England on a Rhodes Scholarship and when he came back, he'd settled in New York. Verna Crowell told Mama Alice once that Miss Grace said, “That boy's up there just making pots and pots of money and it scares his daddy to death. He thinks you can't make all that much money unless you're doing something dishonest. He thinks Clay won't come back to Littleboro even for our funerals.”

I had gotten a degree in art education and signed up to teach at a school in St. Tomsbury, Maine, where I met and moved in with Ben Johnson, a green-eyed bookshop clerk who read his wares, worried about energy conservation, world hunger, nuclear waste, and wanted to live in the jungles of Brazil because they were supposed to resemble the early days of the Earth. The bookshop lost more money every month and he kept denying it, emotionally and physically. If we talked, we fought, so Ben Johnson was reading something his every waking minute. I got tired of shouldering the whole load for someone who didn't know that responsibility begins at your own kitchen table. When Verna Crowell called me to say that Mama Alice had fallen, was in the Raleigh hospital unconscious and would probably have to go to a nursing home, I came home to visit and stayed. I slept in my old bed, woke to the walls of my childhood and wanted them back. The week my grandmother died, I wrote for Ben Johnson to ship my things. They came two weeks later and I was surprised at how neatly fifteen years of my life fit into a dozen medium-sized boxes.

Ethan Drummond hadn't charged me a cent for settling Mama Alice's estate. After the nursing home bills were paid, there was little left. After the fall, Mama Alice had required around-the-clock skilled nursing care, and it didn't come cheap. I wanted her to have the best. She deserved it, and if it meant there was nothing left but the house and its contents then I would find a way to work things out.

There had never been a question in my mind that Mama Alice fell. Until that second little note landed in my life. There was no question now, just a nagging “what if?” Sometimes the words seemed to stand just behind my shoulder and whisper loudly in my ear. I tried to brush them away.

Ethan opened the door. “You-all can come on in now. I'm short a secretary this morning, so you'll have to excuse things.”

The lawyer Kingswood Heyman sat huffed up and hulking in a leather wing chair. He smiled slightly at Miss Lavinia's cousin and gave a half wave with one hand, as if he'd really like to dismiss all of us.

Scott stood. I took an old wooden chair that faced Ethan's cluttered desk. I'd never seen it when it wasn't at least a hundred papers deep in stacks and folders that slid and leaned, stuck out sideways in all sizes and colors.

“Seems Mr. Heyman and his client are a little worried about some … er … missing property of Miss Lavinia Lovingood.” Ethan didn't look at us; instead he fumbled with papers.

At last, I thought, maybe we can find out what all the fuss has been about. That would be a relief. I'd been accused of murder in an offhanded way, searched in an unconventional way. And I didn't know a darn thing about either or anything that was going on.

“Exactly what?” Scott asked. “What are they looking for?”

“Miss Lavinia”—Kingswood Heymen stood, loomed rather, in front of us—“traveled this time with some of her jewelry. I won't be specific, except to say it can't be found. Not with her luggage, nor her handbag, and it's not in her car. Stands to reason it was stolen, and you wouldn't be the first innkeeper to let a sleeping person be relieved of some of their valuables, and, in Miss Lavinia's case … her life.”

Scott sprang at Heyman then and grabbed his lapels to pull him face-to-face.

“Stop,” I said. “Stop.”

Ethan pulled Scott away. “Son, there's no need for that. He's got no proof.”

“Except the missing pearls,” the cousin piped up.

“Pearls?” I asked.

“Among other things,” Heyman said. “Family pieces acquired over a lifetime. They won't be hard to trace.” He eyed me with a hard, unmoving stare and brushed his lapels and his shoulders, brushed away any traces he'd ever been touched. Finally, he shook himself like an unfriendly horse that had been petted.

“I've known this young lady all her life,” Ethan said, “and her family before her. They're as fine as they come. You could trust her with your life. Most certainly a handful of jewelry. She'd never touch it.”

Heyman pushed the cousin toward the door. The poor man looked as if he were being pulled by an invisible rope, eyes bulging, heels dragging. “We'll get this straightened out if I have to jerk all the skeletons out of all the closets in this Podunk place.” Heyman banged the door so hard the glass rattled.

“Sorry,” Ethan said. “That man can't get what he wants and get away fast enough to suit me.”

“Ethan,” I started, “you know—”

Ethan waved his hand in the air like he wanted to erase all that had gone on in this room in the last half hour. “You don't have to tell me. I know you didn't have anything to do with the old lady's death, much less some assorted pieces of junk. I got a feeling Heyman is the kind who tries to create a cyclone to try to cover up some of his own mess.”

Scott shook Ethan's hand and I hugged him, smelling tobacco and the same scent of aftershave I remembered from childhood, feeling the same rough wool of his jacket against my face. “Take care,” I said.

Ethan's voice followed us down the hall as he waved us out. “Bye,” he said and then repeated what he'd said earlier, “You two be careful.”

“I think he's right,” Scott said. “People in this town have been lucky. They've trusted too long.”

“Mama Alice never locked the back door in her life,” I said later.

“What about Verna? Some of the other neighbors?”

“They've always been in each other's houses … just like their own. They'd be offended by a locked door. Think it was the snootiest, most unfriendly thing they'd ever seen.” I laughed. I thought of all the times Verna Crowell had poked her head in the back door and hollered, “Yoo-hoo, Alice,” and just come on in. If no one was home, Verna had been known to borrow eggs, sugar, a cake pan, a steam iron, whatever she needed, and then return it a few hours later, laughing she bet we hadn't missed it. The whole neighborhood had had a “my house–your house” kind of arrangement. Not anymore.

Scott dropped me off at the Dixie Dew, which seemed too quiet with Ida Plum gone for the day and no guests. It was almost dusk when I realized I hadn't seen Sherman all day. I checked his favorite sleeping places, under the back steps, the sunny side of the garage, the swing glider on the front porch. Nowhere. The food I'd put in his bowl this morning hadn't been touched. That definitely wasn't like Sherman, who ate like some other cat growled behind him ready to snatch his dish away.

I checked the shrubbery around the front hedges, calling, “Kitty, kitty!” as I went. Sherman was named after the Civil War general and Southern scourge, William Tecumseh Sherman. I could scold, “William Tecumseh, stop that,” and it usually worked. Right now, I just wanted to find the cat. I wondered if I yelled, “William Tecumseh, come here right now,” the cat would appear at my feet.

When I'd checked out the grounds around the Dixie Dew I started down the street toward Littleboro Cemetery. Sherman and Robert Redford had been known to romp over and around tombstones, hide under cedars and pounce at each other. Sometimes I thought Robert Redford saw himself as another cat, one with longer ears and a short tail. That rabbit was a riot. Verna Crowell sounded so funny when she talked about him. “I was sitting there watching TV, me and Robert Redford, when the news come on about that young Kennedy boy. I thought Robert Redford was going to jump right off my lap. It scared him so.”