Miss Dimple Picks a Peck of Trouble (7 page)

The troubled couple watched as Miss Dimple selected several greeting cards, paid for them, and left. They didn’t know she was thinking of the time seven-year-old Clay confessed on his own to breaking one of the small windows in the back door of the school while playing softball too close to the building.

“Please don’t tell my daddy!” he’d begged. “I’ll be in such big trouble! My aunt Maud gave me a whole dollar on my birthday, Miss Dimple. Will that be enough to pay for it?” It was, and Dimple Kilpatrick never said a word. She also didn’t tell the child if it had been more than a dollar, she would have taken care of it herself.

Chloe took a deep breath. She felt as if at least part of the load had been lifted from her shoulders. She knew from working with Dimple Kilpatrick that she had a sharp mind and a shrewd intellect and also had been instrumental in helping the police with several cases in the past. What a relief to have her on their side!

But what was keeping that lawyer? Chloe took a paper straw from the holder and wrapped it around her finger until it fell apart.

“Don’t.” Knox covered her freckled hands with his calloused brown ones. “Chloe, surely you don’t believe for one minute that Clay had anything to do with this girl’s death.”

“Prentice. Say her name, Knox.
Prentice.
She was a person, a part of our lives … only now she’s dead.” Chloe had seen Elberta Stackhouse sitting like a wax figure at the police station, and for the first time she hadn’t thought of her as competition for her husband’s affections, but as a woman with a grief so deep there was no balm to reach it. She had wanted to go to her, but Knox had steered her away, and Bertie’s hurt pulled at her until she thought she would drown in the awfulness of the thing.

Did Bertie believe, as the police must, that their son had something to do with Prentice’s death? If so, she must hate him, just as Chloe would hate anyone who harmed one of her children. But surely the woman knew Clay better than that.

It was getting late now and people who worked downtown hurried past on their way home. It was too hot to linger. Had they heard about Prentice? How many of them had already made up their minds that Clay was guilty?

“Curtis Tisdale’s the best,” Knox was saying. “We’re lucky to get him.” He squeezed her hand. “They can’t hold him, Chloe. We’ll have Clay home tonight.”

“I want to see him. Why won’t they let us see him?”

“Right now, he needs Tisdale more than he needs us, I reckon. But it won’t be long now.” Her husband lowered his voice. “Sounds to me like that nut in Atlanta might’ve had something to do with this.”

She looked up. “What nut?”

“The one who’s been killing all those women. Surely you’ve read about it. Scatters rose petals over their bodies. They call him ‘the Rose Petal Killer.’”

Chloe winced. She’d read about those murders in the newspaper but hadn’t paid much attention. With the war and all, there was so much violence, so much killing, why read about more? “I thought maybe they’d caught him by now,” she said. Chloe studied her husband’s face, the sun lines around his solemn brown eyes, his lips working to maintain composure.

“They didn’t find—were there rose petals on
Prentice
?” Her words were slow, shattered, like the flowers themselves. She grew roses—a few of them—in that plot behind the old smokehouse. Clay had never paid much attention to them, probably didn’t even know they were there.

Again, Knox gripped her fingers. “Overheard two of the men talking at the station. One of them sounded like that detective who questioned Clay. ‘Covered in petals,’ he said. Didn’t know I was listening.”

Her husband leaned closer, beckoned her forward until she could feel his breath on her cheek, see the small scar where he’d nicked himself shaving. “Chloe, they found her—Prentice—out by the old mill. Said it was their necking place.”

“Whose necking place?”

“Theirs. Clay and Prentice’s. Hell, just about everybody in town has been there.”

Chloe hadn’t. In her day, proper young ladies didn’t do things like that. “How do they know it was theirs?” The lemonade she’d drunk earlier pitched and spewed inside her. This baby boy she’d suckled, sung to, and, with great difficulty, potty-trained—she didn’t know him at all.

“Guess he told them about it.” Knox almost smiled. “Chloe, where did you think they went after those games?”

“Why, to get something to eat, I guess. I don’t know.” And I don’t want to know, she admitted to herself. All Chloe Jarrett knew was that she wanted her son back home again. She wanted things to be the way they’d been before. The thought of Prentice—pretty young Prentice—lying dead somewhere was like coming upon a washed-out bridge. You couldn’t get around it; you couldn’t get over it; you simply had to deal with it. Chloe made herself ask the next question. “Knox, do they know how she was killed?”

He shook his head. “Maybe
they
do, but I sure don’t.” He stood and looked toward the doorway as Curtis Tisdale approached them, his face grim.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

It wasn’t real. Delia looked at the wrinkles in her green linen lap, her hands twisting the Lilliputian hankie her mother had pressed upon her. And what good would that little thing do? Delia had stuffed one of her father’s large handkerchiefs into her purse in case she needed to cry. Charles Carr had died when Delia was eleven, but her mother still held on to small reminders, and until recently she had kept a tin of his pipe tobacco on top of her chest of drawers.

But Delia hadn’t cried, and it didn’t look like she was going to. What was the matter with her? Her best friend was dead. Murdered. Kind, beautiful Prentice, who had never hurt a living soul, was gone forever from her life, from all their lives. And she had yet to shed a tear.

Next to her, her mother stared straight ahead, her face all drawn and tight, her hand barely touching Delia’s arm, but touching it just the same. Delia was glad it was there. On her right, her sister, Charlie, sat with closed eyes, one hand shading her face. The sharp edges of her small white purse dug into Delia’s thigh, and now and then she got a whiff of Charlie’s Chantilly cologne, a gift from her fiancé, Will Sinclair, before he left to fly missions overseas. Like Annie’s brother, Joel, Will was involved in helping to run the Nazis out of France, and Charlie wrote him faithfully every night.

It looked as if the entire community of Elderberry was wedged inside the small Presbyterian church, built to accommodate less than half that number. Delia felt a trickle of sweat ooze down her face and used her fancy handkerchief to blot her brow. Miss Ella Clyburn, whose small cottage she had passed every day on her way to high school, sat in the pew across from her, a drooping white rose pinned to her navy blue dotted swiss dress, and Delia wanted to smile when she saw it.

Clusters of tea roses grew on either side of the gate to Miss Ella’s house, and every day during blooming season, she wore a pastel blossom pinned to her sagging bosom. Delia and Prentice had once brazenly picked a couple of the roses and Miss Ella not only lectured them sternly but telephoned their homes to report the misdeed. If Prentice were here, they would giggle and nudge each other, share a secret little smirk.

But Prentice wasn’t here. She was down front in that glossy brown box covered in a blanket of primroses, daisies, and Queen Anne’s lace as dainty and sunny as she was.

Was.
Not is.
Was,
as in gone, dead, the final exit, and there was no reason for it, no explanation.

The pianist began to play familiar hymns, Prentice’s favorites. “Abide with Me,” “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” songs she used to sing in her clear, sweet soprano. Charlie wiped her eyes and their mother snuffled softly; others wept openly.

Delia wanted to swallow, but she couldn’t because there was a rock in her throat. No, not a rock, a boulder, and her mouth was as dry as road dust.

Awareness settled upon her, as loud in its stillness as a clap of thunder. Around her, people drew in their breath, exchanged stiff-necked glances. Fans fluttered into laps, hymnals slipped silently aside, and Delia sensed, more than heard, muted footsteps on the carpeted aisle behind them.

An usher leaned over and whispered to Miss Ella across from them, and she shifted to permit Chloe Jarrett to slide in beside her. Knox was seated in a folding chair in the aisle next to his wife, leaving Clay standing all sallow and hollow-eyed at the end of the pew while hundreds of pairs of eyes tried to look somewhere else.

Before the usher could return with another chair, Delia’s aunt, Lou Willingham, who sat on the end on the other side of Charlie, gave her niece a firm poke in the arm and whispered for her to move down.

Delia sucked in and inched over as best she could, and with a minimum of shuffling and grunting, they made room for Clay at the end of their pew, but their resentment was like a spear ramming home, and the cutting coldness made her shiver in spite of the warm flesh on either side. Prentice was dead—strangled, they said—and the one who had killed her could be sitting close enough to touch.

*   *   *

It was almost over. The prayers that consoled and strengthened or fell on hearts that solace couldn’t heal; the words of the service spoken with tenderness and grace by the minister who had watched Prentice grow up, and whose eyes mirrored the hurt they all felt. Prentice had been raised in this church, and only last Sunday, she had sung in the choir.

Now Pauline Hobgood, the soloist, sang “Amazing Grace.” Sang it without accompaniment in a deep, rich contralto that seemed to Delia to reach inside her spirit and lift it up. Listening, she kept her eyes on the window behind the pulpit. It was a large, round window of clear glass, and beyond it shreds of clouds hovered in a summer blue sky. She felt her mother’s hand close firmly over hers as they stood for the benediction, and shut her eyes as Prentice’s aunt Elberta and her friend Adam Treadway followed the casket up the aisle. She couldn’t bear to look at them, to have their grief burrow into her heart on top of her own.

And then something happened that made some smile and others cry. As people began to slowly make their way outside, the pianist began to play “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” She played it joyfully and she played it loud, as if she meant for it to reach Prentice herself.

“Isn’t that a Christmas hymn?” someone behind them muttered, but Delia knew exactly why that particular carol had been requested. To Elberta Stackhouse, Prentice
was
an angel.

*   *   *

First Leola and now Prentice.
Two funerals in a little over two weeks. Dimple Kilpatrick, sitting in a back pew with her friend Virginia Balliew, watched the crowd of mourners shuffle past. When an older person died, it wasn’t unusual for people to smile and speak to one another or even to converse in respectful voices, but no one spoke here. What could one say? Their faces were grim; some were tear-stained. All seemed intent on reaching the doorway and stepping back into the living world.
Was one of them a murderer?

Leola’s daughter, Mary Joy, nodded solemnly to Dimple from the other side of the church. Someone patted her shoulder as he passed; another squeezed her arm, recognizing the sadness she felt at losing “one of her own” in this senseless way, for anyone acquainted with Dimple Kilpatrick knew she thought of those she had taught in that manner. It didn’t matter if they had children or even grandchildren; she would always claim a part of them. And it had become increasingly difficult to lose the brave young men who had died in the service of their country.

The Jarretts, she noticed, had somehow managed to slip away through a side door. Everyone knew the police had questioned Clay but hadn’t been able to hold him due to lack of evidence. He remained, however, at the top of their list of suspects. Chloe, already frail, seemed to be fading into gray, and Dimple was worried about her. Having made a promise to help, she would try to see Chloe tomorrow. Dimple didn’t know who was responsible for Prentice Blair’s death, but she was certain it wasn’t Clay Jarrett.

Mary Edna Sizemore, the home economics teacher at the high school, passed by on the arm of the school chorus director, Sebastian Weaver, both openly crying. The drama coach, Seth Reardon, his eyes bleak, followed solemnly behind them. Prentice had been bitten by the acting bug her senior year in high school, when she landed a major role in her class play, and had even been considering taking courses in theater at the university.

Head down, Elias Jackson, the high school principal, paused to blow his nose before attempting to regain his composure.

Rather than subject themselves to the close confinement of the exiting crowd, Dimple and Virginia had agreed to wait until the sanctuary was empty before leaving, and now Dimple rose as the last person made her way out the door.

“You might as well sit back down, unless you want to stand outside and wait on me,” Virginia whispered, tugging at her skirt.

“Whatever for?” Frowning, Dimple complied.

“Because I have to go to the rest room! I thought this church would never empty!”

“Well, my goodness, Virginia, why didn’t you say so? We would’ve left earlier.”

Virginia sighed. “Dimple, you should know by now my bladder doesn’t like for me to stand and wait. When I have to go, it just doesn’t do for anybody to get between me and the bathroom.”

Dimple agreed her friend was right and decided she might as well stay where she was instead of trying to weave her way through those gathered around the front of the church. She had been sitting there only a few minutes when she overheard an exchange behind her in the narthex that immediately seized her attention.

*   *   *

Where in the world did her family get off to? You’d think they could at least wait!
Delia wandered into the narthex after leaving the rest room, where she’d splashed cool water on her face. It hadn’t helped. Her eyes still burned and her skin felt hot and sticky. She looked about before starting for the door. They were probably waiting for her out front to ride to the cemetery together.