Who Left that Body in the Rain? (28 page)

Wednesday’s weekly
Hopemore Statesman
carried a fine article on Skye and his many services to the community, and said the funeral would be Saturday morning at ten. Friends could visit with the family at the funeral home on Friday evening.

Thursday morning, the world started going downhill in a go-cart with faulty brakes.

Around eight-thirty Isaac called. “You seen this week’s paper yet?”

“Got it right here. I was reading about Skye’s funeral.”

His voice was sour. “You see the picture on page one?”

I couldn’t miss it. The entire front page was devoted to how our police arrested Jimmy Bratson, former assistant manager of Sky’s the Limit, and Richard Smith, alias Raymond Smythe, alias Ramón Suarez, on charges of conspiring to ship drugs between Florida and northern destinations. The article was accompanied by a three-column picture of the two men limping out the Sky’s the Limit door in obvious pain.

“That picture’s gonna give us trouble in court,” Ike grumbled. “They’re sure to allege police brutality. The only way we can prove we didn’t beat up on them is to call you and Laura to testify that you immobilized the suspects before we even got there. When the jury learns you hit Bratson with your pocketbook, we’re gonna get laughed out of court.”

“Maybe you ought to make pocketbooks standard police equipment,” I suggested.

“I’ll tell the chief. Meanwhile, let me give you the worse news. Jimmy Bratson’s friend has an airtight alibi for Friday night. He was at a political fund-raising dinner in Miami, at the head table, until nearly eleven, and went out for drinks with the candidate and some other people until well after midnight. It all checks out. As far as Chief Muggins’s suspect list is concerned, Skell now occupies second place after Mr. Garcia—”

“—and Mr. Garcia only gets first place because he’s Mexican,” I finished sourly.

“You said that; I didn’t. But you don’t hear me contradicting you.”

I hung up feeling awful. It took me nearly an hour to realize it wasn’t just because Skell looked like the only real suspect for killing his daddy. My throat was scratchy and beginning to feel like somebody was pouring boiling oil down it, real slow.

At noon, Rosa Garcia came by my office upset and angry because I couldn’t “do something” to get her daddy out of jail. She and her mother were holding the restaurant together, she said, but barely. I told her I wished I could do something, but I really couldn’t.

By the time she left, I felt dreadful. My head was fuzzy and my nose streaming. I finally admitted I was afflicted with more than failure and poor self-esteem, and headed home. I have never admired thoughtless people who stagger on with a cold, dispensing germs to everybody in range. Seems to me that the considerate thing to do when you get sick is admit you aren’t indispensable, endure the inconvenience of a day or two in bed with a book and your favorite music, and let your germs die a natural and isolated death.

I told Clarinda to make up a bed in a spare room for Joe Riddley so he wouldn’t catch whatever I had; then I put on flannel jammies and turned on my electric blanket. In a few minutes she brought up a hot lemonade well laced with her secret ingredient—which is a lot like Tansy’s. I climbed into bed figuring the world could manage to revolve for a little while without my personal oversight. If it couldn’t, I didn’t care.

I did call Gwen Ellen to tell her I was coming down with something and to suggest she gargle with Listerine, in case I’d shared a few germs. I also told her I was real sorry I couldn’t get by the funeral home the next evening, but whatever I had felt like it had come to stay awhile. I promised I’d be at the funeral—on the back pew. I had the perfect excuse to sit where I could watch everybody who showed up, to see if anybody looked guilty.

Joe Riddley woke me up when he came home just before six, banging around in the closet taking off his work clothes and putting on some old khaki pants and a shirt he could putter around in. I’ve told him a hundred times I am less likely to wake up from the closet light than I am from the racket he makes without it, but he has never believed me.

When he came out, I saw that he was walking like a man who was carrying not just the world but the whole universe on his shoulders. I roused myself enough to ask, “What’s the matter?” My mouth tasted like I’d been sucking on Joe’s perch, and I felt like I’d gained twenty pounds since noon, all of it in my head. My shoulder muscles flat-out refused to lift that load from the pillow, so I lay back and prepared to hear that we had black spot on our entire new delivery of roses down at the nursery or that mealybug had infested our entire stock of houseplants.

“Nothing.” He dragged himself to the mirror and smoothed his hair.

“You look mighty down in the mouth.”

“Yeah, I reckon I am. It’s this infernal rain.”

That got me up on one elbow. “Joe Riddley Yarbrough, you know rain never made you this downhearted. It’s Skye, isn’t it? You are mourning. Why don’t you admit it—to yourself and the rest of us? You are grieving like a rooster in quarantine.”

He sat on his side of the bed with his back to me. “I’m grieving all right, but it’s not just that he’s dead. It’s—” He sighed. “I can’t tell you, Little Bit. He asked me not to. And I wouldn’t if I could. You wouldn’t like it.”

“You don’t like it either, honey. Tell me.”

His next sigh nearly carried him through the floor. “I told you, I can’t.” He hung his head and began shuffling one toe on the rug, which he knows good and well drives me crazy.

I prodded him with my foot to get him to stop shuffling and start talking again. “It’s about that legacy, isn’t it—the life-insurance policy?”

He nodded.

“I’ve been thinking about that. It’s odd he didn’t leave it to Gwen Ellen instead of you.”

“He left a letter with it. He wanted me to do him a favor.”

This was like pulling teeth with tweezers. “What was the favor?”

He stood and went to the window. Rain was still streaming down like it had heard Middle Georgia is a great place to retire.

When my husband turned from the window, the room was so dim that all I could see was his outline. His face was a shadow and his voice a rasp of pain. “I’ve told you, I can’t say. Skye asked me not to. Now stop bugging me and get back to sleep. If you don’t start looking better soon, I’m going to take you down to the mortuary to see if they can pretty you up a little.” Satisfied he’d done what he could to comfort the sick, he clomped down the stairs.

Friday passed in a fog. Clarinda trotted upstairs with soup and more hot lemonade, and I slept for hours. I didn’t really wake until Joe Riddley came upstairs to go to bed.

“You go to the visitation?” I called drowsily.

He came and stood in the doorway. “I went.” He tugged off his shirt and threw it in a ball on the chair.

“Were there lots of people there?”

“I wasn’t counting.” He pulled off his pants and added them to the chair. He’d never have gotten away with that if I’d been well enough to remind him that I unlock our clothes hamper each evening between eleven and twelve for his personal convenience. The old coot was being irritating on purpose, seeing if I was too sick to notice.

I wasn’t too sick to notice, just too sick to care. “What does Marilee say about tomorrow’s weather?” I muttered.

Taking that as a sign I was wide-awake, he turned on the overhead light. “Marilee didn’t do the weather. They had a new boy who didn’t look any older than Bethany. You could tell he was reading the monitor, and he got the slides all mixed up. I laughed so hard, my sides ache.”

“What’d he say tomorrow will be like?”

“Fair and sunny, but I doubt he knows a thing about it.”

He surprised us. We woke up to sunshine.

 

“Maybe they ought to give that kid the weather job,” I said as we ate breakfast. I wasn’t feeling good, just halfway human. “He’s better at it than Marilee.”

Joe Riddley chewed his cereal and considered the matter. “He’s not as pretty.”

Joe gave a ribald laugh from his perch above the sink.

Not until we were getting into the car did Joe Riddley remember to ask, “You feelin’ any better?”

My first thought was that Skye always remembered when Gwen Ellen was sick and sent a yellow rose each day until she was well. My next thought was to be grateful for what I had: a living husband.

“I feel lousy. I don’t have any fever left, just the nose-running, eye-streaming, throat-scratching nasties.” I rubbed my face, willing my sinuses to stop aching. “I took a pill that will stop my runny nose, but do I look like Mrs. Bal loonhead, or just feel that way?”

He peered from beneath his bush eyebrows. “Mrs. Bal loonhead with a red nose.”

“I ought not even be going, but I shouldn’t infect anybody on the back pew. I don’t think the funeral will fill the sanctuary. Do you?”

“If it does, you can go into the narthex and listen on the ushers’ speakers. Sorry you have to sit by yourself.” As a pallbearer, he would sit on the front row across the aisle from the family.

“Cindy called to ask if they can sit with me. I told her about my cold, but she said Walker never gets sick and she’s been exposed to every germ in the universe at the kids’ school. She also said she depends on me to show her what to do.” Cindy was raised Episcopalian. Walker had gone to our church every Sunday until he left for college, but since they’d gotten married, they spent Sunday mornings lazing around reading the paper and drinking coffee or playing a round of golf.

That bothered Joe Riddley and me so much, I expected him to say something, but he just rolled down his window and took a deep breath. “Smell that air. It’s spring, almost. And you’d think somebody ordered this day just for Baby Sister, wouldn’t you? Not a cloud in the sky, fruit trees and dogwoods fixin’ to come out, and look—there’s a deer.” A white flag disappeared into the forest across from Hubert’s pond. Joe Riddley had probably forgotten the streaming, nippy weather we’d been having. Short-term memory loss has some advantages.

Soaking up sunshine, we didn’t need to talk. I didn’t feel good enough to talk, anyway.

It wasn’t quite nine-thirty when we got to the church. The music hadn’t started, but a gray steel casket was already up front, the top half open, the other covered with a blanket of yellow roses. I didn’t want to go down there, but Joe Riddley insisted. “Come on, Little Bit. Pay your respects.”

“I’ve god this awful code,” I reminded him, making it sound even worse than it was.

“You aren’t going to give Skye anything. Come on.”

I trudged behind him down that interminable aisle and stood looking at the friendly, lovable face of one of my dearest friends. Tears stung my eyes and a sob ripped my poor sore throat. As Joe Riddley put his arm around me to escort me back to my distant pew, I saw Gwen Ellen, Laura, Skell, and Skye’s parents through a blur of tears. They were gathered in the little session room off the sanctuary, with the door half closed. I wanted to go tell Skell to sit in the balcony out of sight, but my legs didn’t have the strength. Besides, Chief Muggins couldn’t arrest Skell without first letting Mr. Garcia go—even if he was low-down enough to arrest somebody at his daddy’s funeral.

I sank gratefully into my pew’s soft red cushion, and Joe Riddley went to sit by the aisle on the left front pew where the pallbearers would be. Our funeral director always lined pallbearers up alphabetically, so Joe Riddley always sat by the aisle. He looked handsome and distinguished in his black suit.

I grabbed a wad of tissues and tucked my pocketbook under my pew out of the way; then I cried awhile. It must have been the medicine, because I’m not much of a crier in public. That morning, I cried for the good things Skye had been to all of us, and I cried for all the things he had not been for Skell and Laura. Finally I remembered a prayer we used back when we still had a preacher who believed in confessing your sins:
Forgive us those things we have done which we ought not to have done and those things we’ve left undone which we ought to have done.
I prayed that for Skye and me both, until I began to feel better.

Chief Muggins made me feel worse again when he sauntered in and sprawled on the back pew across the aisle. He gave me a little nod, but otherwise ignored me. Because he was wearing a brown suit instead of his uniform, I figured at first he was sitting back there because he wasn’t comfortable in church but wanted to pay his respects to the dead. From the way he was looking around the congregation, though, I began to get real nervous about Skell coming out and sitting up front.

The organist started playing a series of familiar old hymns. That music reached down inside me and dredged up sadness like a golden, aching cord. Knowing it was still partly the medicine and fearing I was about to get maudlin, I concentrated on watching people line up in the center aisle to look in the casket. A good many had sent flowers, even though the family had requested donations to Hands Up Together. Seeing that notice at the bottom of the program, I remembered how Skye and Joe Riddley were talking about the project on the very day Skye died. I’d have started sniffling again if Ben Bradshaw hadn’t walked by on my outside aisle right then, stiff as walnut. Such self-control was inspiring.