Doing It at the Dixie Dew (9 page)

Mama Alice laughed. She said she could see both sides. She wanted Littleboro to stay small, be a place where everybody knew their neighbors and that still had shops downtown.

I said I would like it to stay small, old-fashioned and picturesque, but I also wanted it to be able to have a bookstore that didn't just sell Bibles and Bible-school supplies, customers to keep a tearoom in operation and enough people passing by and through to support a bed-and-breakfast. I'd talked to Mama Alice about the idea of the Dixie Dew even then, only we'd be doing it together. I wouldn't have the whole deal down on my shoulders alone.

Ida Plum was off until Thursday. “You don't need me until then,” she'd said Saturday. After Mr. Lucas there had been no guests. I hoped it wasn't an omen. The practical side of me said there would be slow periods in the business, any business, as well as dry periods. So Ida Plum was right. “You don't need me, but call me if somebody else turns up dead,” she said with a little laugh as she left. Her words hung heavy in the air like a dark cloud.

I was dusting the sideboard in the dining room when I heard a car door slam and saw three men coming up the walk to the front door. One of them was Ossie DelGardo. Even from the porch I recognized his uniform, his bulk and the glint of his badge. The other was Miss Lavinia's lawyer, Kingswood Heyman. I remembered him from the funeral. He carried a briefcase, his fat fingers loaded with rings large enough to set seals on letters and documents, and he jingled a chain copper bracelet on each wrist. Heyman introduced the younger, sweating polyester guy as “[something mumble], cousin of Lavinia Lovingood, Lester Moore.”

I showed them into the living room. Scott had surrounded the fireplace with newspapers as well as covered the opening. I didn't explain, nor offer them coffee, though there was fresh in the kitchen. I hoped Ossie DelGardo would smell it and be aware of my deliberate inhospitable act.

Ossie DelGardo chose to sit in Mama Alice's little needlepoint rosewood chair. He looked like a circus elephant balancing on one of those three-legged stools. The lawyer and Miss Lavinia's cousin took the blue velvet love seat.

“You there,” Heyman said, jutting his chin at me, briefcase balanced on his knees. “You got property that belongs to this estate.” He danced his fingers on the briefcase.

“I beg your pardon.” I wished now I had a cup of hot coffee to spill in somebody's lap. The nerve of this stranger, walking in, accusing, demanding.

Ossie DelGardo gave Heyman a look that seemed to simmer him down a little. Meanwhile Ossie kept taking inventory with his eyes, the gilt-edged mirror over the green marble mantel, Mama Alice's Tiffany lamp. “That real?” he asked, walked over to it and thumped the glass with his thumb as if it were a watermelon.

“Yes,” I said, and cringed. “Very real.”

Ossie scuffled the edge of one of the throw rugs I used to hide worn spots in the carpet. The carpet had many places so thin you could see the floor through them. “Threadbare” was the word made manifest in this case, I thought. Guests thought the throw rugs were cute, that they added color and charm.

“I've got a search warrant,” Ossie said. He pulled a paper from his chest pocket. “This fellow thinks you're holding on to something that's not yours. Not that I think anything of the sort, but it never hurts to do a little looking.”

He had sent Bruce Bechner over earlier in the week to move Miss Lavinia's little car. I missed it. Such an elegant little sports car, made in Italy, I'm sure, and she'd had it flown over, parked and waiting for her at the Raleigh-Durham airport. Now it graced the parking lot behind the police station. Poor, sad little car.

“I don't know what you're looking for,” I said. “I have no idea that anything that belonged to Miss Lavinia can still be in this house. Not unless it fell between the cracks.”

“That's just what we thought,” Ossie said. “And you wouldn't mind us looking.”

Look up the chimney, I wanted to say. See if you get a faceful of dirt. I almost wished Scott would descend like a genie, covered with soot, see if they'd startle.

The lawyer settled back, at ease to wait, but Miss Lavinia's cousin paced. I watched and thought Mama Alice would say that man looked like a little banty rooster just cocking his spurs, wanting to jump somebody. He looked like the type to do more crowing and pecking than actual damage.

Ossie pulled open a drawer in the mahogany desk and fumbled through Mama Alice's papers. He pulled open another drawer, almost dumping the entire contents. He checked under the drawers, felt down the sides, back, studied the rug again, surveyed the hall and sunporch where my paint cans were stacked in the corner next to the auction chairs. In the kitchen he checked the pantry, every drawer, cabinet, stove … even the oven and under the burners. He opened the refrigerator, peered in the freezer, pulled out the ice trays and analyzed each cube.

“If you'd tell me what you're looking for,” I said, “I could save you time and trouble.” Which should be easy because it wasn't there.

Ossie opened the door to my bedroom, summed up the stacks of lumber, cans of paint, tools, glanced at my drawing board, then shut the door and started upstairs.

I listened to him open and shut closets, drawers, go up the attic stairs and stay awhile before coming down. In my mind I could see Scott crashing through the roof, landing smack on Ossie DelGardo, and the two of them coming tumbling down the stairs like wrestlers.

“This house got any old hidden stairways, passages to the cellar?” Ossie asked after he came down. “Cubbyholes? Little wall safes?”

“I grew up in this house and never found any,” I said.

Scott came in the kitchen covered with soot, his face and hands blackened. He looked for all the world like a coal miner. Ossie DelGardo sniffed and took a step away from him.

“You wanta undo these fireplaces, let me take a look?” Ossie asked Scott.

“Look for what?” Scott asked. He pulled off his toboggan and fluffed his hair. “God, this stuff is not only thick and black; it sticks to you. There must be a hundred years' grime and grease and grit in those babies.”

“Or more,” I said.

Ossie waited for us to follow him to the living room.

Scott loosened the edge of one section of newspapers in and around the chimney.

“I can't see,” Ossie said, and straightened up. “You think a peephole is enough? I think you're trying to hide something and figure I'll give up looking.”

Scott tore away more newspaper. Ossie stuck his head up the hole, then pulled back, his face coated with black soot, only his eyes white and angry. He sputtered, coughed, cussed under his breath. “That's damn smart,” he said. “But I'm up to your games. I'll be back.”

After he left, the other two trailing behind him like cats, Scott and I laughed, thinking of Ossie DelGardo's soot face. We laughed over lunch, but asked ourselves what on earth had started those guys on such a search.

“Mama Alice always said rise above the situation,” I said. “And this time I did. She would be proud of me. The nerve of those slimy, oily creeps.”

Scott said he'd vacuum my paint scrapings when he did the chimney soot and finish the job if I wanted to start something else. A tempting offer if there ever was one. I'm not the neatest painter in the world. I just slap it on and get the job done, while Scott can paint for hours and never spill a drop. I handed him my brush and gloves, which he promptly laid aside. “Only sissies paint wearing gloves,” he said.

I went to Mama Alice's old sewing machine in the back bedroom and picked up the pink-and-green print I'd bought for ruffled valances for the sunroom windows. I'd also bought enough for ten squares of color to go over the sheets I'd use for tablecloths. Polished cotton. I'd seen this print once in the dining room of a country club in Atlanta. Then in a picture in
Southern Living
. I might have lived in the North, but my heart never left the South. The pink-and-green print looked so clean and crisp I fell in love with it. Then when I saw the same fabric at The Calico Cottage and on sale, I knew I had to have it.

When I unfolded the cloth, a piece of paper dropped onto my lap, a small square with four words printed in black ink. My hands began to shake and my knees buckled as I stood. The memory of Miss Lavinia's little note was still a fresh memory. Those two cryptic words that were the last two she ever wrote. Tears stuck in my throat like stars, each point a spear of ice. The note read: “Margaret Alice was pushed.”

Pushed! The word felt like a granite boulder rolled on me. No, it couldn't be true. My grandmother had been found at the bottom of the basement steps. Her neck had been broken and she never regained consciousness. She'd lived in that never-never land for months in that nursing home.

She'd fallen down the concrete basement steps she'd cautioned the rest of the family about all my life. She had said, several hundred times at least, “Somebody's going to fall down those basement steps and break their neck.” But she was the one who fell. She was in excellent health, except for an arthritic knee. Still, there had never been the least question in my mind that Mama Alice fell … not until now.

Chapter Nine

“Who would do something like that?” I asked. I grated carrots to make carrot nut muffins.

Scott leaned against the counter, reading his mail. Lately he stopped by his post office box, then brought his mail here to read. He studied sale catalogs from Sears, Lowe's and Home Depot. His idea of Heaven seemed to be a hardware store or a lumberyard and paint outlet. “Sounds like a crank note,” he said. “I wouldn't worry about it … just the reason behind it.”

“But what if she was.” I said. “I mean Mama Alice—”

“Don't think about it,” Scott said. “A note like that isn't a serious threat. Just something from a sick mind.”

“But how sick?”

“Well, folded in between fabric sounds more like a prank.” Scott said, “I've got to wash these chimney brushes and get them back to the rental shop in Raleigh before two.”

“Wash away,” I said, shuffling through my mail, which included a letter from Ben Johnson, my ex something; a friendly sounding chatty note any longtime friend might have written. There wasn't a word of affection or any reference that there had ever been any. His handwriting was almost calligraphy. Slow, intense. Ben is the Luddite of Luddites, those who believe and cling to the “old ways” as the best way. No computers, no e-mail for him. He even said he thought all these electronics were polluting the airwaves. “Get the paint off your hands long enough to pick up a pen,” he wrote. “You can't work all the time. You know what that does to one's mind. Not that it's ever had much of a chance with mine.”

“Yeah,” I wanted to answer. “Turns it to mush.” And that's how I felt. I really should write Ben. We hadn't been in touch except for his Christmas Eve phone call. But all this was too much to write about. Too much to believe. This quiet, sleepy little town where a dog could leisurely and regularly cross Main Street at midday and not have a car honk at him. Well, maybe a toot or two … if traffic happened to be heavy.

I kept grating carrots. I'd make several batches of muffins and freeze them. Who would write a note like that and put it in my fabric? And did it have anything to do with those two words Miss Lavinia had written before she died? “That is…” Strange last words, I thought. But not threatening. This note had an implied threat to it.

I had bought the curtain fabric over a month ago. The Calico Cottage was a dusty little shop with racks of patterns, rows of pins and bolts of materials that stood like huge books on the shelves. And presiding over it all was a wrenlike woman, Birdie Snowden. Could she have tucked in the note with the sales slip like she used to tuck in the cards of buttons and spools of thread when you bought cloth to make a dress, blouse or skirt? Mama Alice, who had sewed so much for me, used to say, “Sometimes I think we'd both go naked as Eve if I couldn't run us up a little something once in a while.”

I ran my mind back over all the guests who had been in and out since I'd opened the Dixie Dew. There had been a dozen or so, including Miss Lavinia and that Mr. Lucas. Maybe he wasn't with a B-and-B directory after all but was some private investigator hired by someone to check me out. Stop it, I told myself. You know that's ridiculous. And thinking of ridiculous, Ossie DelGardo. But he hadn't been in my bedroom this morning, only looked in the door. What about the two who had been with him, lawyer Heyman and Lester Moore, cousin Polyester Pants? They hadn't left the living room, I was sure. I'd stayed in the downstairs hall when Ossie went upstairs to poke around. And besides, it just seemed more a woman's thing to do, fold a note inside a piece of fabric. Somehow, I thought a man would be more likely to mail a note to you, pin it with a knife to the front seat of your car or seal it in an envelope and slide it under the door.

Could any of the cake ladies of last week have quietly slipped into my bedroom and left the note? They would have to go past me and probably Ida Plum, in the kitchen, and I was sure they didn't. I tried to think who brought cakes. Verna Crowell had been the first one. Verna had been Mama Alice's best friend, closest neighbor for sixty years or longer. There wasn't anything Verna wouldn't do for Mama Alice, or anyone else for that matter. Verna was a kind soul, not a sick mind, even if she did insist on her daily ration of sherry.

I looked again at the black ink, the letters printed in long slash-like strokes. Strange. And stranger still, it looked like handwriting I'd seen before. Not the same handwriting as Miss Lavinia's note. Her two haunting words, “That is…,” which didn't make sense. This note, in a totally different handwriting, did make sense in a way. At least it was a complete sentence, “Margaret Alice was pushed.” But who made their letters like that? Skinny, almost as if they had been painted with a brush.