“Good-bye, Judge.” That deputy had called me “Miss Mac” back when he’d had to stretch to put his pennies in our gumball machine, but Joe Riddley had insisted on formal titles with law-enforcement officers, and I maintained the tradition.
“Good-bye, Officer Wilkes. Thanks again.”
When I got inside, I discovered I’d forgotten to put my scuffs in the closet when we left that morning. That dratted macaw had tried to make a meal out of one and pooped on the other. I stomped angrily toward the sound of the television in the den, figuring that where I found Joe Riddley, I’d find Joe. Then I’d decide which one to throttle.
My husband was stretched out in his recliner watching Sunday golf, dressed for comfort in a shapeless old gray sweat suit. Joe was prancing along the back of the den sofa. “Where in tarnation have you been?” Joe Riddley demanded without looking away from the screen. “Your car’s here, but you weren’t. Nearly scared me to death. I was fixing to call the police as soon as this match is over.”
I knew at once what had happened: worry had shortcircuited his system and erased his memory tapes from that afternoon. A counselor who met with me a few times after Joe Riddley got shot had explained that could happen for a while. She’d suggested that when he had a brief memory lapse, I ought to make a statement repeating his words. That would make him think about what he’d said, and get him back on track. So, instead of saying, “You idiot, you left me at MacDonald’s and forgot me,” I said, “You couldn’t find me here.”
Joe Riddley glared like I was the one with the weak brain. “That’s what I just
said.
Where were you?”
“Over at MacDonald Motors, waiting for you.” I rested one hand on his shoulder. The counselor had also said touch can put a person in touch with reality. She’d never lived with Joe Riddley’s reality.
My loving husband smacked away my hand and pointed out in a disgusted voice, “We picked up my car already. And MacDonald’s isn’t open on Sunday. You can’t remember a danged thing lately.” He turned his attention back to the champions on the seventeenth hole.
Joe had been sidestepping back and forth along the wide back of the sofa. When I looked his way, he scuttled to the far end and got very busy preening his breast. “You ruined my slippers, bird,” I informed him. “I am going to tear you limb from feather.”
He bobbed his head and squawked.
“Hush, Little Bit,” Joe Riddley growled. “You’re bothering me.”
That was one more drop than my bucket could hold right then. I climbed the stairs feeling like I’d spent the weekend fighting a bear. I took off my Sunday blue wool suit and pulled on a warm red sweat suit of my own. The only other slippers I owned, which I’d stuck far back in my closet for obvious reasons, were bright green furry ones with big wiggly eyes that Bethany bought for my birthday with her own money when she was ten. I gave a mental shrug as I shoved my feet into them. Who would see me tonight except Mr. Fashion Plate downstairs?
He didn’t even notice I’d left and come back, much less that I had changed clothes. I rescued our afghan from under a couch cushion where I’d started hiding it from Joe, slipped off the slippers, lay down, gave Joe a warning look that he’d better not mess up my hair, and covered myself with pure love. Mama crocheted that afghan the last year of her life, choosing bold primary colors in defiance of the grayness that was closing around her.
Joe Riddley’s attention was riveted to the green on the screen.
Joe took four sideways steps across the back of the couch, looked at my bright covering, raised one claw, and bobbed his head a couple of times. “You keep your claws off this afghan, you hear me?” I told him. His big white eye glared at me for a long second, but he sidestepped away. I may not have a face that will launch a thousand ships, but I have a glare that will occasionally stop a parrot.
In a few minutes I roused enough to go call Gwen Ellen. We chatted briefly, but she said Skye’s relatives would all be there until the next morning, so we both decided I wouldn’t go back out in the rain to see her until they had gone. I rested until the golfers were replaced by a commercial. “Did you talk to Ike about Humberto Garcia?” I asked Joe Riddley, adding, “You went to look for him after Charlie Muggins found the safe rifled at MacDonald Motors, which was right after Walker left to get Maynard out of jail in Orlando.”
“I know that. But I couldn’t find Ike, so I came on back home. You weren’t here.”
There wasn’t any point in going down that road again. “You want eggs and bacon for supper?” I was so tired I wasn’t sure I could cook even that much.
“That’s what we had last night,” he reminded me.
I got up, put back on my green slippers, and plodded to the kitchen. When I was out of earshot with a closed door between us, I pounded the countertop with both fists. “Lord, how can he remember what he had for supper last night, but can’t remember where he left his wife a couple of hours ago?”
I didn’t expect God to answer. I just needed to ask the question.
I rummaged in the freezer to see what leftovers Clarinda had frozen in the past couple of weeks. Thank goodness for a cook, a microwave, a daughter-in-law, and quick foods. I thawed and heated two helpings of beef vegetable soup, opened a jar of applesauce Martha had canned back in the fall, and rummaged around for a package of Jiffy cornbread mix I knew we had somewhere. By the time somebody on TV had made ten times our annual income by knocking one small ball into a hole, I was setting supper on the table.
I was fixing to call Joe Riddley to eat when the phone rang. Without wasting breath on unnecessary things like saying who she was, Clarinda demanded, “Walker get to Orlando yet?”
The clock over the refrigerator said 6:30. “He hasn’t had time.”
“I hope he’s driving fast. I hate to think of those babies spending the night in jail. You hear such awful things—”
I’d heard the same awful things, and I didn’t like the idea of Maynard and Selena in jail any more than she did, but since she’d said it first, it was my turn to offer comfort. “Walker’s driving as fast as he can. He ought to be there around ten or eleven.”
“You call me soon as you hear anything, okay? And if he doesn’t call you, you call him on his cell phone and find out what’s going on. Then you call me.” Having given me my marching orders, she hung up.
Joe Riddley and I ate in the companionable silence of two people who are generally fond of each other but don’t have to say so all the time. Afterwards, he did the dishes while I thumbed through our week’s catalogues. He was washing the soup pot when we heard a car splash down our drive. I opened the back door so whoever it was could run right in, but nobody was there. A second later, the front doorbell rang. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever comes to our front door.
I flicked on the porch light. Through the beveled glass pane in the top of the door, I saw Rosa Garcia. She shivered in a light trench coat that wasn’t half warm enough in that weather. Her face looked pinched and miserable.
I flung the door wide open. “Miss Garcia. Come in.”
She stepped in, hair plastered to her cheeks and coat sopping. Her thick braid hung down her back like a heavy wet rope. “I look a mess.” Her teeth chattered like castanets in the unheated hall.
I waved one hand down my red sweats and green fuzzy slippers. “I look like a refugee from Christmas. Come into the back, where it’s warm. Our furnace is on zones, and we don’t heat the front unless—” I was about to say “we have company,” but she was company. “Why didn’t you wear a heavier coat? Or bring an umbrella?”
“I came so quickly—” She stopped, eyes anxious and shoulders high with tension. “I am embarrassed to have come at all, but I thought—I hoped—” She stopped.
I hurried down the hall to the bathroom and grabbed a towel for her hair. As I passed the den, I snatched up Mama’s afghan. “Take off that soaking coat and wrap up in this. It will warm you up in just a second. Then step into the bathroom and dry your hair. I’ll throw your coat in the dryer and make us all some cocoa.” People always talk best at our big round oak table with a cup of hot chocolate in front of them.
“Thanks.” She handed me the sodden coat and pulled the afghan around her shoulders. It made her plain black dress look very festive. She didn’t bother to go into the bathroom, but tugged out the rubber band that held her braid and loosened the plait into a curtain that covered her shoulders. She toweled it vigorously, then started to replait it with deft hands.
“Leave it down to dry,” I suggested, taking the damp towel, “and come on into the kitchen.”
While I went to the utility room to put her coat in the dryer and the towel in the hamper, Joe Riddley turned from drying his hands. “Why, hello, Miss Garcia.”
If she was surprised to see a man in a yellow apron finishing the supper dishes, she didn’t mention it. She just said, “Please call me Rosa.”
“I’m Joe Riddley, and that’s MacLaren over there.” He shook hands, then took off his apron and hung it in the closet.
“Hello, hello!” Joe called from his perch on the curtain rod above the sink.
Rosa gasped in delight, and the tense skin around her eyes crinkled into a smile. “He is beautiful. Would he come to me?”
“Hold out your arm. We’ll see,” Joe Riddley told her. While I busied myself pouring milk into a saucepan, Rosa shoved up the long sleeve of her dress and held out one thin arm. Joe flew down and perched there.
She stroked his back. “I had a parrot when I was a girl.” She had a catch in her voice. “Pedro, an African gray who used to turn almost upside down to talk to you. He’d call
Hola! Hola!
—that’s Spanish for ‘hello’—when anybody came to the house. He was stolen from our backyard when I was twelve, and I cried myself to sleep for a week.”
“Not to worry. Not to worry,” Joe consoled her, bobbing his head several times.
Her laugh was merry. “You are wonderful.”
“Good Joe. Good Joe,” he agreed, raising one claw to show he could stand on one foot.
“He knows what I’m saying?”
“Sure he does,” Joe Riddley told her. “That’s one smart bird.”
I stirred powder into the milk, poured steaming cocoa into yellow mugs, and added three marshmallows each. When Miss Garcia got hers, she seemed to be waiting for something. “Do you need something else?” I inquired, wondering if Clarinda had left cookies on Friday. She’d almost stopped making them now that the boys were gone and I was getting what Joe Riddley kindly called “voluptuous.”
Embarrassed, Miss Garcia took a quick sip. “No, of course not. It’s just that we put cinnamon in chocolate. . . .”
She showed us how to sprinkle it on top, and it tasted real good.
Joe Riddley fetched Joe some peanuts, seeds, dried fruit, and vegetables from his treats jar and put them on the green plastic place mat at what we’d come to call “Joe’s place.” Joe marched around and around the mat picking up nibbles, then stopped and looked at the rest of us for praise.
As we sat at the table sipping our cocoa, Rosa talked to Joe. “You’re a pretty bird, aren’t you? Yes, you are. Want a peanut?” She laughed aloud in surprise and delight when he pecked it off her finger. I was glad to see her face losing its pinched gray look.
“Thank you. Thank you.” He turned his head halfway around and searched for mites on his rainbow back, as if being fed by beautiful women was his daily routine.
I thought it was time she told us what she’d come for. “What can we do for you?”
She took a deep breath. “I truly am embarrassed. I would never have come, except for this. Even then, you may think I’m silly.” She opened her black shoulder bag and pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper. I recognized Jessica’s handwriting. Under the title “A Person I Admire,” Jessica had written:
I admire my grandmother, Judge MacLaren Yarbrough, because she is smart. She is even a detektive! When we have mysteries in town the police cannot solve, she finds out the answers and tells them. She even captures murderers, but my daddy does not like for her to do that because he says she will get herself killed, too, one day. I don’t think she will. She is too smart. So if you ever have a mystery you need solved, call my grandmother. She will solve it for you faster than the police!
I read with Joe Riddley peering over my shoulder. “She got that right.” He pointed at
she will get herself killed, too, one day.
I felt proud and embarrassed all at the same time, but I had to tell the truth. “Honey, this is real exaggerated.” I handed back the paper. “I mean, I’ve helped the police with a few cases—”
“—and nearly got herself killed,” Joe Riddley added sourly.
“Sic ’em. Sic ’em,” Joe advised.
Rosa put the paper back in her purse. “I don’t know who else to turn to. When we came back from church this afternoon, the police came to our house and took my father down to the station. They asked him all sorts of questions, and while they let him come home afterwards, he thinks they believe he killed Mr. MacDonald.”
Joe Riddley wasn’t as good as he used to be at keeping important confidences. “Chief Muggins mentioned that this afternoon.”
Rosa leaned toward me, an urgent look in her dark eyes. “You don’t believe that, do you? What reason would he have? He didn’t even know the man. Besides, everyone says Mr. MacDonald was killed Friday evening, and
Papi
was at the restaurant until nearly two, cleaning up and closing out the register. Then we went home exhausted and fell into bed. But even if he was out and about for a little while, my father would never kill a man.”
I stirred my cocoa and gave her a thoughtful look. “I understand, though, that he was making threats to ‘kill that MacDonald if he lays a hand on my little girl.’ ”
She lowered her gaze to the tabletop. “That was just wild talk. It was all my fault. I should never have told him—”
She paused so long that Joe Riddley got curious. “Told him what?”