Doing It at the Dixie Dew (13 page)

“If you don't mind stepping around paint cans, ladders and stacks of lumber. You'll have to use your imagination. All four bedrooms upstairs have been redone; everything else is in the process.”

Shirley Putterman stood in the dining room. “That corner cupboard must be two hundred years old. Honey, where on earth did you get a piece like that?”

“My grandfather,” I said. “He made it. Also the bed in your room, chest … the nicer pieces of furniture.”

“This table must hold sixteen. It's solid, I bet.”

“We don't serve meals,” I said. “Only breakfast … until ten.” I suddenly thought of Miss Lavinia, who never made it down to breakfast at all.

“We had barbecue. When Leon gets barbecue hungry and there's a place within fifty miles he can spot it. He eats.” Shirley met him at the front door and patted his tummy. “That's my Pooh Bear,” she said. “Upstairs.”

“To the left,” I said. “The green room.”

“I just love it,” Shirley said from the stairs. “Love it.”

It felt good to have guests again. The Dixie Dew was still in business. I felt like flying a victory flag to celebrate. Don't tread on us, I wanted to say. Maybe I ought to make a flag with the slogan or some motif and fly it out front. Or different ones for every day in the week.

After Scott left and the Puttermans got settled for the night, I made myself a sandwich and a cup of tea, which I took to the front porch, then sat in the swing and took deep breaths of good, clean Littleboro air. I loved the smell of boxwoods and sometimes there was a lingering waft of Verna's lilacs.

Later that night I was reading in bed long after the house had gotten totally quiet. There was a breeze through the open windows and the sheer curtains billowed softly. A touch of dampness to the night air made it a little too cool for me. When I got up to lower the window I saw someone standing on the corner under the streetlight. Reba? Or the ever present Ossie DelGardo? The bulky shadow moved out of the light before I could tell if the figure looked male or female. But why was someone standing there at all? Were they watching the house or my bedroom? Either one didn't make me feel very comfortable. I checked the locks on the doors. I listened to crickets and tree frogs and watched a luna moth batting the streetlight. Everything seemed normal. At peace in Littleboro. Or was something just watching and waiting with me in mind?

The next morning at the drawing board in my bedroom I steadied my hand and cut a pineapple stencil with an X-ACTO knife. I was surprised my hand didn't shake. Easy, I told myself. Slow and steady and easy. I bent over Mama Alice's old breadboard where I'd tacked the pattern with the stencil over it.

The day before, Scott had painted the sunporch linoleum jade green with dried swirls of dark green over it like shadows fringing the sun through spring leaves. It turned out better than I thought it would.

I planned pink pineapple designs in the center of every eighth block. When you can't afford new, you make do. I thought of Mama Alice who ate, slept and breathed the “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without” philosophy. Bless her, I thought, how much she taught me, how much she left that doesn't demand time and money and attention like the Dixie Dew. I was convinced that had Mama Alice been alive today, she would have insisted on doing a bed-and-breakfast herself. And the tearoom. She'd be beating up pineapple muffins at midnight, setting places before she went to bed … and loving every guest, looking at pictures of their families, sending them off with recipes and cuttings from whatever plant or shrub they had admired blooming in her yard.

When I'd cut the last curve of the pineapple stencil, I laid my X-ACTO knife carefully beside my drawing board. I held my stencil to the light and said, “Darn good. In fact, damn good,” for someone who spent too much of my art training teaching kiddy balloon and papier-mâché crafts. Every day I'd laughed and hugged a hundred kids, then gone home to the most morose man in the world. More than morose, he hated everything, starting with me just because I happened to be in the room.

I said softly to the ceiling, “If it takes everything in me, I will get to the bottom of what's going on in this town. I will find out who pushed Mama Alice and who's trying to kill me. I will not live with threats on my life.” I'd gone through too many years of playing Little Red Riding Hood, going down the garden path with my basket of goodies not suspecting the death wolf waited in my own hometown.

I drew the outlines of each pineapple on the painted floor.

“It's Pink Panther paint to me,” Scott said from the kitchen. I hadn't heard his truck in the driveway or the kitchen door open.

I laughed. “That's better than the way Ida Plum chooses to describe it.”

Scott picked up the small brush and filled the pattern with pink paint. We worked silently for the most part, surrounded and filled from fingertips to toes with good talk from WUNC Radio. I worked until my back felt bent and Scott filled in the last pineapple on the last corner.

Usually Scott would only paint with his own brushes, but he didn't have one small enough for this delicate job. He insisted no one could properly clean brushes but himself, so he took our used brushes to the basement to clean while I stood in the dining room doorway and tried to see the completed room in my mind's eye. Polyurethane would go over the pineapples tomorrow. A couple of coats and they'd be sealed to take a lot of wear, plus the shine would add light and a clean look. The one solid wall would be papered in a calico print of pinks and white and green. Valances of quilted fabric that matched the cloth napkins and complemented the tablecloths would finish it off. Elegant but warm, that was the look I wanted. Most of all filled with paying customers.

Scott came in with clean brushes. He smelled of turpentine and soap as he reached for the paper-towel holder. “You clean a good brush and it'll last,” he said, kneading and stroking the bristles.

“Is it possible someone wants this bed-and-breakfast to fail?” I asked. “If it goes, I go, and another piece of fine old historic property gets eaten by the bulldozers. Who would want that and why?”

Scott popped a beer, poured it, foaming and blooming a fine head, into a glass. He sipped long and loud. “Ah, babe,” he said. “You got all the puzzle pieces you need. It's putting them together that's going to take some doing.”

We went out to the front porch. Next door, where the new condos were being built, the carpenters had quit early and quiet settled in on the porch. Scott and I sat in the swing and stared through the magnolia trees at the gray colonial façade. “Who in Littleboro is going to buy three-hundred-thousand-dollar condos? Somebody is going to lose their shirt … or petticoat, or both,” I said.

The sign out front said:
ALCAMY COMPANY, ANOTHER FINE COMMUNITY.
It told us nothing.

“Like fast-food places,” I said. “It's probably a chain. But Littleboro doesn't seem to me to be the place for condos.”

“Ha.” Scott sat up straight. “Think opposite. Fast food needs traffic. Condos … retirement condos need the quiet life. That's Littleboro.”

“That
was
Littleboro,” I said. “But I think you're on to something. Before last week, Littleboro was a quiet, clean, green place in which to be part of a community, play bridge or go to Pinehurst to golf … your ideal village.”

“And it will be again,” Scott said, “when this bizarre business gets cleaned up.”

I shook the ice in my glass. “You talk like it's a case of acne. If so, Miss Lavinia and Father Roderick got taken with it terminally.” I finished the last swallow of my tea. “There are clues and I don't think Ossie DelGardo is doing a damn thing he can't do with his feet on his desk. The most effort that man puts out each week is to collect his paycheck.”

I punched a pillow I'd taken from a chair and held in my lap, scaring Sherman, who jumped from the porch roof onto the top of a column, then into a cedar that swayed as he backed his way down furiously. When he reached the ground, he streaked toward the back. “Wonder if that was Sherman on the roof I heard yesterday?”

“Before you found the earring? And thought it was Reba?”

“Reba was here … sometime. That earring is hers and it's real. Here she is living under a tree … in a tree … whatever … and wearing who knows how much of a fortune in jewels.”

“Only in Littleboro.” Scott laughed. “All this sounds like one of Ida Plum's stories … except the murders. Ida Plum's stories never had violence. They were just bizarre and crazy and strange and loony.”

“Reba's a little puzzle piece we can work with,” I said. “She fits somewhere. That jewelry belonged to somebody.”

“Jesus,” Scott said. “Remember, Reba said Jesus gave her that necklace.”

“Oh Lord,” I said. “And Jesus saves S and H Green Stamps, too. Remember that old joke?”

“No,” Scott said, and laughed. “But both of us are thinking in the back of our minds that it's a possibility Reba is trucking all over town loaded to her scalp with Miss Lavinia's jewelry. What a hoot! Who would believe it?”

“I believe it,” said I. “And my good name goes riding along with her. Oh Lord, does it?”

When Scott left, I stood on the porch for a few minutes. Sherman rubbed my ankles until I picked him up.

A part of me wanted to ask Scott to stay. To say we'd make dinner, something hot and peppered, full of garlic and herbs, and then … I didn't know what came after that. Or what I really wanted to come after that. So I watched his blue truck zip up the street, around the courthouse and completely out of sight. I stopped my train of thought before it jumped the track and headed toward the river or someplace more dangerous in my life.

Chapter Fourteen

The next morning I stood before the drugstore jewelry counter with twenty dollars in my hand. I missed “dime stores,” the Roses stores, McLellans and Woolworths I'd grown up with. Littleboro had one of each and I'd spent Saturday mornings with fifty cents to spend among the marshmallow peanuts, Blue Waltz perfume sets and rhinestone hairnets. Usually I bought books of paper dolls or wonderful, waxy-smelling boxes of crayons or magic brush paint books.

“Ah,” said Malinda. “A big-time spender. Got me a live one, Mr. Gaddy!” she called to the back. Then to me she said, “I'd rather sell rings and things than peddle pills.” She slid on a dozen jangle bracelets, held both arms up like a snake charmer. “This is usually Delores's counter, but she's off this week. Went to see her son in Alabama. She'll never recognize the place when she gets back. What can I sell you?”

“The cheapest, tackiest, wildest junk jewelry you got,” I said.

Malinda laughed and reached behind her to a box heaped high with every color of plastic made to jangle or wear on ears or string like Christmas lights around your neck. “This box has been waiting for a sucker like you. I'd say it's waited as long as it can without scenting up the whole place.” She pulled out a huge pink plastic chain and held it up. “Think this will fit? You planning on the country club dance or something?”

“Reba,” I said. “They're for Reba … not me.”

“For a moment there I thought you'd left your taste back in third grade.” Malinda plowed with both arms through the jewelry. “Give me twenty dollars and this entire box of priceless jewelry is yours, and yours alone.”

Malinda dumped the contents of the box into a brown bag for me. “Tell her not to wear it all at one time or she'll be arrested for tacky.” She folded down the top and handed it to me. “Is it Reba's birthday?”

I hesitated. “I wish it were that simple.” Should I tell Malinda? For some reason I felt if anybody in town could be trusted with the truth, it was Malinda. So I told her about the jewelry, and Malinda leaned her head back and laughed. “For a quiet gal you sure do get in some messes.” Then she asked seriously in a low tone, “And what do you do with the real things after you get them from Reba? Turn yourself into a target?”

“I think I know who the real things fit,” I said. “And if I can't get them back to their owner, I can at least get them to the next in legal line and get some DelGardo hassle out of my face.”

“Good luck,” said Malinda. “And let me know what happens?” She waved me out the store, glanced behind her and whispered, “Take care, you hear.”

Now to find Reba. Should I try Reba's tree or first try to guess where Reba might be? The Dinette. Sometimes Blue's Dinette behind the courthouse fed Reba. The meal was pay to keep her away during their busy hours.

I put my face against the plate glass and shielded my reflection with one hand on my forehead. The lunch crowd was lawyers sleek in their dark suits and paisley ties, visiting judges, defendants, telephone linemen, construction workers and anybody in town who liked their food Southern fried and floating in gray grease. They ate there. A plate of greens, the dried beans of the day, sweet potatoes, fried okra, corn, corn bread, all went for something like $5.50. Tom Blue and his son John Robert cooked six days a week in a blackened back room, passed the plates over a swinging half door and kept half the county fed. Including Reba if she ate in a back corner and kept quiet.

Sure enough, I saw Reba, Kool-Aid blanket-shawl and all, in a back corner swigging the last of her iced tea. I waited. I sat on one end of a stone bench under a budding dogwood tree in front of the courthouse and waited. Reba would be by, two or three toothpicks in her mouth and smiling like an otter. I pulled out the largest, loudest bracelet and necklace and laid them on the bench. Bait the trap, I thought. Spread honey for the strange orange bear.

Reba did look bearish and bulky in her blanket as she swaggered, full bellied, down the walk. She spotted the bracelet like a hawk drawing bead on prey. “Mine?” she said, and swooped.