She jerked her head toward Maynard Spence, our nearest neighbor. He sat at our kitchen table with his long gold ponytail gleaming in the light and a fool’s grin on his face. “Hey, Mac.” He hoisted a mug. “Where’s Joe Riddley?”
“Talking to his dogs in the pen. What are you doing here?” I bent to pat my beagle, Lulu, reassuring her I’d returned home yet again in one piece. “Don’t you have things to do?” Maynard was getting married the next morning.
“Clarinda and I were checking on a few last things for the rehearsal dinner tonight.” He hauled his tall frame erect. “But it is time I got moving. I’ve got to collect my tux and Selena, then we have to drive all the way to Milledgeville to visit her great-grandmother. She’s too frail to come to the wedding, so Selena’s promised we’ll get all dressed up and take pictures with her.”
Clarinda rested both hands on her stout hips. “Miss MacLaren, did that boy just say he’s gonna see his little bride in her dress before the ceremony?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Maynard said, further rocking her boat. “I helped design the dress.”
“I’ll bet she’s gonna be real fashionable,” Clarinda muttered to Lulu, “for eighteen fifty.” Maynard had a master’s degree in art history from NYU and was curator of our Hope County Historical Museum. He did sometimes tend to prefer the past to the present.
He laughed and gave me a quick hug. “See you tomorrow. Don’t forget, I want you to sit on the pew with Daddy. You’re the closest thing to family I’ve got.”
“We’ll be there,” I promised.
“See you tonight, Clarinda. Sure hope you’re speaking to me by then.” He went out the door at a fast lope, stopping on the porch to greet Joe Riddley.
Before I could ask Clarinda again what was bothering her, my husband ambled in with Joe, his scarlet macaw, on his cap. We had inherited Joe the previous October from a man who died in our dining room.* Joe slept in the barn, where we kept camping gear, the fishing boat, and lawn and garden equipment, and Joe Riddley carried him back and forth to the office every day. His favorite perch was on Joe Riddley’s red-billed cap with “Yarbrough’s” stitched in white letters across the front to advertise our store, Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery.
Joe Riddley knuckled Joe gently so he’d fly to the curtain rod above the sink, and hung his cap on its hook by the kitchen door. “Hey, Clarinda,” he said mildly. “Have a good mornin’?”
Clarinda grunted. “Not so’s you’d notice.” She continued to bustle about the kitchen huffing and puffing and making a lot of clatter without doing much else as far as I could see. Our whole dinner seemed to consist of one pot.
Joe leaned down and turned himself almost upside down, peering at her. Then he called “Sic ’em. Sic ’em.” When she ignored him, he righted himself and turned to preen a feather on his back. That parrot was a lot of trouble, but even I had to admit his scarlet breast and rainbow back and tail made a gorgeous display against our gray wall.
Lulu danced around protesting that parrots didn’t belong in the house. Joe taunted her with more squawks, safe since she couldn’t fly. Clarinda banged flatware on the table, her chocolate-brown face pinched and martyred.
“Hush!” I yelled. “All of you, hush. What is the
matter
with you, Clarinda?”
Clarinda heaved a sigh that nearly dropped her sizeable bosoms to her kneecaps. “You aren’t gonna believe what Maynard has gone and done. Here he is getting married, you know—”
Joe Riddley gave a snort of impatience. “Of course we know. Have we talked about a blessed thing since Christmas except that precious wedding?” He was still recovering from getting shot in the head back in August.* By now he could talk plain unless he was tired, remember most things, and walk unaided, but his sweetness and light tanks weren’t always full.
“Hush,” I told him. “I want to hear what Maynard’s done.”
Maynard had lived down the road from us all his life, a pallid gawky child who whined a lot, emphasized words in a strange way as he spoke, and loved history and art in a small town that preferred golf and football. To tell the truth, I hadn’t been real fond of him back then. I’d felt more charitable when he’d given up a good New York museum job the year before and hurried home when his widowed daddy had a heart attack. I’d been impressed with the way he nursed Hubert back to health. And I’d grown really fond of him while he was helping me do a spot of detecting right before Joe Riddley got shot. I’d even introduced him to his bride-to-be, Selena. And I had to admit that the pale boy who left home several years before had come home a downright handsome fellow. I didn’t even mind his earring anymore.
Nobody had expected Maynard to stay in Hopemore once Hubert was on his feet. But here he was, a year later, still taking some of the load off Hubert at Spence’s Appliance Store and spending the rest of his time revitalizing our once moribund Hope County Historical Museum. Last fall he’d supervised a crew in renovating a Victorian house in town where he and Selena would live. Currently he was fixing to open an antique store in one of Hopemore’s three antebellum mansions up on Oglethorpe Street, near the courthouse square. It appeared to me if anybody deserved praise it was Maynard.
Also, Clarinda loved him like he was her own, and if you don’t believe that, you’ve never witnessed the relationship that can grow up between a lonely little boy and his neighbors’ cook.
Joe Riddley looked up and said to Joe, “Hey, bird, maybe he’s decided not to go through with it. I couldn’t blame him. A man never knows what he’s getting in for, tying himself down for life. The woman might turn into somebody he hardly knows. Take Little Bit, here—”
I gave him a light swat. “You already took me, forty-three years ago, for better or worse. You got the better and I got the worse.”
“Sic ’em, sic ’em,” Joe advised again.
Clarinda glared up at the parrot, her own feathers equally ruffled. “Don’t you poop in my clean sink, bird.”
“So what has Maynard done?” I was tired of waiting to find out.
She rested her fists on her wide hips again. “Gone and spent money on a new sports car. I told him and told him his Saturn would do fine until they put something by, but he wouldn’t listen. Says Mr. Skye gave him a real good deal, and it’s a honey of a car. I’d like to honey him. It’s pride; that’s what it is. Nothin’ but pride, and he’s gonna marry that sweet child with a load of debt on him.” She thumped bowls down on the countertop in a way that made me nervous for my crockery.
“He’s twenty-seven,” I reminded her, “and he inherited a good bit of money from his uncle in Atlanta. He knows whether he can afford a new car or not.”
She ladled something into the bowls and huffed several times, making it clear that working for somebody as unreasonable as me was the greatest imposition in the world.
At the sink, Joe Riddley soaped his hands for a second time and rinsed them good. “Maynard’s smart. Valedictorian of his class in high school and got a big scholarship to NYU.”
“How can he remember that when he can’t remember he already soaped his hands?” I asked Clarinda, but she didn’t crack a smile.
Joe Riddley reached for a towel, dripping water all over the floor. “Ought to make good money on that antique store, too, and Selena’s a nurse. They’ll pay off that loan. Stop your worrying. What did he get?”
Clarinda took a skillet of cornbread from the oven and banged it down on a trivet in the middle of the table. I sighed. We’d probably have a new dent. Our table has been in the family for three generations, and is what dealers like to call “distressed.”
Clarinda pursed her lips to show she’d rather certain words didn’t have to pass through them. “Blue BMW convertible, or so he says. ’Co’rse, I haven’t seen it. He didn’t want to dust it up, coming down your road. Said he’s leaving it in town until after the ceremony.”
“The way you talk,” I told her, “folks would think we were hicks living in the middle of nowhere.” Instead, we were college-educated, reasonably prosperous store owners living at the end of a good gravel road. We’re half a mile from the highway and less than a mile from Hopemore, county seat of Hope County, located in that strip of Georgia between I-20 and I-16. Joe Riddley’s great-grandfather built our house right after the War (if you have to ask which war, you weren’t born in Georgia), and none of his descendants has ever felt a need to lay asphalt—although I sometimes think we could have paved it in gold and saved money, with all the gravel we’ve put down.
However, since the road does get a tad dusty in dry spells, and that particular month
had
been dry, I decided not to fuss. What was bothering Clarinda most was not Maynard’s new car, but Maynard’s departure from next door to his own house in town, and his upcoming switch of allegiance from her to Selena. That’s why I offered her a little comfort. “His Saturn might not make it all the way to Disney World. It’s getting pretty old, and it’s been giving him trouble.” I went to wash my own hands, sending a warning glare up to Joe about messing in my hair while I was under him. “What if they broke down between here and there?”
She heaved another enormous sigh, but I could tell she was a tad mollified. Like I said, the woman and I know each other. She set steaming bowls on the table. “I hope y’all are planning on goin’ to that openin’ tonight, ’cause I just made corn chowder, squash cornbread, and canned tomatoes for your dinner.”
“What opening?” Joe Riddley held my chair, then took his own.
I buttered my cornbread and sneaked Lulu a bite. “The new Mexican restaurant, remember? They’re having a fiesta tonight with a live band, a dancer, and all the food half price. I ordered a lot of plants for them and promised we’d be there.”
Joe Riddley gave me a puzzled frown. “How come you had to order plants? We got plants.”
“He wanted hibiscus, palms, and cactus. Kinds they have in Mexico, I guess.” Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery has a store in the middle of town and a large nursery outside the city limits, but we don’t have many calls for tropi cals in the middle of winter. “He ordered so many,” I added, “that I don’t see how he can fit them all in and still have space for customers.”
“Y’all need anything else?” Clarinda demanded. When I shook my head, she plodded off to the den, where she’d rest while we ate.
Joe Riddley chewed his corn chowder as if he had something on his mind. “I’ll be underdressed. I don’t have a sombrero.” The old familiar twinkle danced in his eye.
I reached over and patted his hand. “So long as you don’t start dancing on tables, hon, we’ll be fine. It’s your turn to say the blessing.” While he prayed, I sent up a silent thanks of my own that I was slowly getting my old Joe Riddley back.
We met when I was four and he six, and had been together ever since. While I don’t often go around saying so, I’ve always thought him the handsomest man in Hope County, with a tall, lanky frame he inherited from a Scottish grandfather and high cheekbones, dark eyes, straight dark hair, and a copper tinge to his skin he got from a Cherokee grandmother. But the past six months had stretched both our patience real thin while he coped with a mind and body that didn’t always function the way they should. Folks who haven’t lived with somebody after a brain injury will thankfully never know what they have missed.
He’d scarcely said “amen” when Clarinda yelled, “Miss MacLaren, Judge Stebley called and said you don’t have to worry about tomorrow—he’ll fix things so you can go on to the wedding.” She waited, then yelled, “Did you hear me? I said—”
I heaved a huff of my own. “I heard you,” I yelled. Clarinda has always refused to take meals with us, but she insists on joining in on our conversation from the den and making us shout back at her.
Joe Riddley raised one eyebrow. “Did she say the judge is postponing your arrest until after the ceremony?”
I gave him a sour grin. “Sure sounded like it, didn’t it?”
What the message Clarinda took really meant was, I would not be on call the next day. I’m a magistrate in Hope County, and Judge Stebley is the chief magistrate. Joe Riddley was a magistrate for thirty years, and Judge Stebley appointed me to serve in his place after he got shot. And no, neither of us is a lawyer. In Georgia, chief magistrates are elected and the rest are appointed from the general population. I was honored to be asked, and figured it was because I’d gone to magistrate’s school with Joe Riddley and watched what he did for so many years. Our younger son Walker, however, let the air out of my balloon. He claimed I got appointed to save the county money: they could reuse the old Judge Yarbrough sign on our office door.
Having passed on Judge Stebley’s message, Clarinda settled herself into the recliner with a maximum number of grunts, preparing to take a little snooze. She would eat her own dinner in queenly leisure after we went back to the store. But first, she had one more question. “You hear from Ridd and Martha today? They definitely gonna be here tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” I called back, slipping out of my shoes and rubbing my feet on the cool floor. “They’ll fly up to West Virginia tomorrow afternoon.”
“That’s good. That’s real good.” Her chair squeaked in contentment. “So long as you’re sure.”
Our son Ridd and his family had changed their annual Presidents’ Day weekend ski trip for Maynard’s wedding, but he’d teased Clarinda he couldn’t get new plane tickets. Clarinda wasn’t going to believe they were coming to the wedding until she saw them in church.
Joe Riddley shouted back to her, “None of us is gonna miss that wedding. Bethany is a bridesmaid, Little Bit here is running the reception, and Cricket’s carrying the rings. It’s a dadgummed family affair.”
So, of course, was the murder.
2
Joe Riddley’s silver Lincoln was getting a tune-up, so he was riding with me that day. The clock on the courthouse tower boomed one as we neared our store. He touched my hand. “Go by the motor company. Skye might have my car fixed, and I want to help Maynard pay for his car as a wedding present.”