Miss Dimple Picks a Peck of Trouble (10 page)

“Are you out of your mind? If Prentice was seeing somebody else, he could be the one who killed her!” Charlie didn’t realize she was shouting until Delia hushed her with a finger to her lips. “Keep it down.… You don’t want to wake Pooh, do you? And how else are we going to learn anything? Any other ideas?”

“Just promise me you won’t do such a foolish thing, Delia. If this person killed once, he wouldn’t think twice about doing it again.”

“But it might even be that Rose Petal Killer they’ve been writing about in the papers.” For the first time that day, Delia Varnadore smiled. “And aren’t you the one to talk, Charlie Carr? Seems to me you and Miss Dimple and Annie Garner attract murder like a magnet.”

And we’re pretty darn good at solving it, too!
Of course there had been a few close calls, but Charlie knew if anybody could get to the bottom of this, it would be Miss Dimple Kilpatrick. “Remember you have little Tommy to think of and a husband coming home to you when this war’s finally over,” she said. “We’ll look into this, I promise.”

It didn’t surprise her that she could hardly wait.

*   *   *

Upstairs, Delia smiled at her small son, who was sleeping froglike on his stomach, one hand clutching a woolly toy dog his father had bought for him before he was born. A quick bath had refreshed her and her bed waited, but as tired as she was, Delia knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep right away. The room held too many reminders of Prentice. A lopsided friendship plaque of plaster of Paris, made when Prentice was ten, hung on the wall over her desk; a pillow cross-stitched with what was supposed to look like an angel was propped in the window seat. Letters Prentice had written when Delia and Ned first married and were living on an army base in Texas were still somewhere in her desk drawer, where she’d put them when she came home a few months before Tommy was born. Prentice wrote weekly at first; then her correspondence dwindled as the demands of her senior year increased.

Could Prentice have mentioned someone in her letters? The drawer stuck; it always stuck, but Delia gave a hard jerk and it squawked open. Thank goodness it hadn’t wakened the baby! The letters, addressed neatly in Prentice’s rounded handwriting, were written on blue paper. There were twelve of them.

Delia tiptoed into the lighted hallway and, sitting in the armchair where on rainy days she’d always liked to read, she spread them on her lap, arranging them in order of the dates they were mailed, but the postmarks blurred.
Prentice was really gone! She couldn’t help her now, but maybe Prentice herself had left behind a clue.

She didn’t find a name until the sixth letter, dated October tenth.

It was the name she had dreaded finding.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Miss Dimple said. “After all, who hasn’t experienced a schoolgirl crush?”

Charlie never imagined Miss Dimple had, but then, she was constantly being surprised at her fellow teacher’s daring and ingenuity and was learning not to be astonished at anything Dimple Kilpatrick pulled out of her hat.

An early-morning shower had refreshed the air and Miss Dimple and Annie were shucking corn for dinner on Phoebe’s latticed back porch when Charlie joined them with the information Delia had found in her letters.

“It sounds like something you or I might have written,” Annie reminded her. “Remember what a crush we had our freshman year on that—”

“Oh, never mind him!” Charlie told her, recalling the good-looking history professor with a fascinating English accent they fantasized about until they learned he was old enough to be their grandfather. “Clay says Prentice was seeing
somebody,
and his is the only name we’ve found that might be of interest. Delia said she hadn’t thought anything about it when she first read the letter because it had become an ongoing joke between the two of them.”

Charlie smiled when she thought of what Prentice had written in the letter her sister had shown her:
Guess who came to the game tonight??? Chenault Kirkland, and he was in his uniform, too! Oh, gosh! I thought I was going to melt! Anyway, he spoke to me—and I think he smiled—or maybe it was just gas.

“When they were in high school, Delia and Prentice used to concoct fantasies about Chenault Kirkland,” Charlie told the others. “You know … like you might about Clark Gable or Cary Grant. She paused, thinking again of the letter.
Chenault is taking me to dinner in Atlanta tonight.… I told him I had to study, but the poor thing was so disappointed.…
“He sent flowers, invited them on dates to exotic places. But of course he was out of their reach.… It was a joke.”

Miss Dimple stripped the shucks off the last ear of corn and added it to the growing pile. “Did she mention anyone else?”

Charlie shook her head. “Well … except for Clay, of course. It was Prentice’s last year in high school and activities kept her constantly busy. As you know, the school chorus presented two concerts a year, and most Sundays she sang in the choir. Then cheerleading took a lot of time until football season was over, and in April, Prentice had a leading role in the class play.”

I can’t believe this is actually happening to me,
she’d written Delia.
I never imagined how much I would love doing it!

“What did she have to say about Clay?” Annie asked.

Charlie shrugged. “The usual, for the most part—where they went for hamburgers, a movie they’d seen together—and sometimes they double-dated.” She paused. “It wasn’t until the last letter that she mentioned Clay’s objections to her going away to college, even though he
knew
she planned to stay in Elderberry and work for a year before leaving.”
It’s true, isn’t it, that girls mature faster than boys? Clay Jarrett is a classic example!
Prentice had written.

“I guess he thought she might forget about it after a year,” Annie said.

“If he could’ve read Prentice’s letter, he wouldn’t have been so surprised,” Charlie told them. “‘I can’t help but be excited when I think of all that lies ahead of me,’ she wrote. ‘Remember that poem Aunt Bertie taught us?
I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.…
I never thought much about it before, but now I think I know what it means.’”

A robin in a nearby apple tree scolded a squirrel on the ground beneath. The blades of a push mower click-clacked in the backyard next door as eleven-year-old Willie Elrod reluctantly cut the grass, but for a few minutes none of the three women could bring themselves to speak.

“I can’t help thinking of that scream you heard, Miss Dimple,” Charlie said finally. “If only we had—”

“If only’s
will drag you down and bury you,” Miss Dimple reminded her, “so put that in a box and lock it away. As it was, I honestly don’t believe we could have reached her in time,” she added softly.

“I wonder why Mrs. Brumlow didn’t hear anything,” Annie said. “The train had already passed at the time she was buying gas and having her windshield cleaned, but she said she didn’t notice a thing out of the ordinary.”

“Probably because she wasn’t looking for it, and the sound came from another direction,” Dimple explained. “I heard it because we were on that hill
on the other side
and behind the Shed.…” She paused. “And it might also be because I have
a few
years experience in being receptive to cries of distress.”

Miss Dimple, realizing that all the grieving in the world would never bring back that wasted young life, gathered up her apron (purple, of course) and shook clinging corn silks onto a newspaper. “As you pointed out,” she reminded Charlie, “Delia was away for over a year after she married Ned, and when she came home after he was shipped out, she had little time for anyone but the baby. Prentice must have had other close friends during that time.”

Charlie nodded. “Delia said she was probably closest to Karen James. They were on the cheerleading squad together. And Iris Ellerby was her best friend in the chorus. As far as I know, they stayed close after high school.” She brightened. “You’re right, of course, Miss Dimple. If Prentice was seeing somebody other than Clay, she might have mentioned it to one of them.

“I think Iris just finished her freshman year at Wesleyan,” she continued, speaking of the girls college in nearby Macon, “and Karen took a secretarial course and went to work as a receptionist for my uncle Ed after Miss Mildred finally retired.”

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Mildred Stovall “hung up her hat” at age eighty-one after years of faithful service to Ed Willingham, one of the town’s two dentists. In the last few years, she had become so deaf that she mixed up names and dates for appointments, so patients only hoped they were showing up on the correct day and time, but genial Ed couldn’t bring himself to let her go.

It was agreed that Delia should be the one to speak to Prentice’s friends, as it would seem more natural, since she was nearer their age.

“I’ll suggest it to her today,” Charlie promised. “After all, I know she’s as eager to clear this up as we are.”

“And then what?” Annie frowned as she shoved the discarded corn shucks into a garbage can. Lately, it seemed, she became irritated and impatient at the least little thing. She knew her fiancé, Frazier Duncan, was somewhere in the thick of the fighting going on after the Normandy invasion in June, and it had been some time since she’d heard from him.

“I can’t help thinking this all started when Leola Parker died,” Miss Dimple said. “Perhaps we should begin there.”

“If you all want that corn for dinner, you’d better get it in here,” a voice announced behind them. “Water’s about come to a boil.”

Phoebe Chadwick’s longtime cook, Odessa Kirby, waved a wooden spoon at them from the kitchen doorway, from which came the aroma of green beans fresh from the victory garden, simmered long and slow with a chunk of streak o’ lean. “Corn bread’s hot, and Miss Velma’s done got the table set in the dining room,” she added.

Charlie’s stomach rumbled. Although she didn’t usually eat at Phoebe’s during the summer months, today she had been invited to take Lily Moss’s place, and had accepted gladly, hoping that lady would extend her visit in Atlanta. “Odessa,” she began as they filed through the kitchen, “I know you and Leola were cousins, but did you know her very well?”

Odessa, busily scrubbing corn at the sink, answered over her shoulder. “Course I knowed her, but she lived way out at the end of nowhere and went to that Zion church over on Blossom Street, so we didn’t see each other a whole lot.” Odessa shook her head, and from the expression on her face, you could tell she didn’t think much of her cousin’s choice of churches.

Charlie smiled to herself. Odessa’s idea of the “end of nowhere” was only a couple of miles from town and in easy biking distance from Bertie’s neat brick bungalow, and through seventh grade, Prentice had been dropped off there afternoons after school until her aunt got home from work.

“Why, I was ten years old before I found out Leola wasn’t my grandmama,” Prentice had once confided to Delia. The afternoon Leola died, Prentice had bicycled the familiar route across fields and woods and through neighboring land the mile or so to Leola’s to pick blackberries. Leola had promised to make them into a pie, and it was close to dusk when Prentice finally filled her pail from the bushes bordering the back pasture. Rounding the corner of the house, where she’d left her bike, Prentice found the old woman’s body at the foot of the two cement steps leading to her small front porch.

“What a horrible thing for that poor girl to have to deal with!” Phoebe said when Charlie reminded them about it at dinner. Although they ate their main meal in the middle of the day, most people referred to it as “dinner.”

Velma Anderson agreed. “It’s tragic enough to come upon a stranger like that, but to find someone you love…” She shook her head. “I just can’t imagine.”

Miss Dimple helped herself to the homegrown tomatoes. “You taught Prentice, didn’t you, Velma? Did you ever hear her speak of seeing someone other than Clay Jarrett?”

“I only had her for typing her junior year,” Velma said, “and as far as I know, Clay was her one and only.” Slowly, she stirred saccharin into her iced tea. Sugar had been rationed since the beginning of the war, and although most objected to the aftertaste of the substitute, they rarely complained. After all, what good would it do? “Prentice was a good student,” she continued. “Well behaved, and so lovely. She had a leading role in her senior play, you know, and I believe she had some talent. Seth Reardon seemed to think so, too. I know he encouraged her.”

“Ah,” Miss Dimple said, and made a mental note to return to that subject later. However, first things first, she thought, and as soon as dinner was over and everyone was seated in Phoebe’s comfortable parlor, where an electric fan whirred without much effect, she returned to the subject of Leola Parker’s death.

“Do they know exactly how Leola died?” she asked Charlie.

“The coroner said her heart gave out when she apparently slipped and hit her head on the bottom step,” Charlie said. “There was a gash on the back of her head.”

She stood and went to the window, as if the sight of the pink climbing rose on the trellis by the porch would somehow lessen the grim reality of Leola Parker’s death.

“Delia said Prentice told her Leola’s hands were still warm, but she couldn’t find a pulse, and her frantic attempts to revive her failed. That was when she saw the smoke.”

“What smoke?” Annie asked.

“It came from the underbrush on the other side of that little stream that crosses Leola’s property,” Charlie said, “and Prentice said it began as a wispy little curl and quickly spread into a billowing curtain of gray. She didn’t want to leave Leola, but what else could she do? Prentice ran inside and called an ambulance and the fire department, but she said it seemed to take them forever to come. Meanwhile, she sat out there and held Leola’s head in her lap while the fire spread along the dry grass until a section of the bank next to the road was smoking black.”