I was feeling a little light-headed about then, and my knees were getting wobbly. Maybe that was my cold, but maybe it was because it had occurred to me that Nicole could easily have killed Skye. She could have called him after Gwen Ellen was in bed, arranged to meet him, and ridden with him out to the deserted road—a private place to talk. Whether she could have driven over him in cold blood I did not know. Maybe I could find out.
I pointed to short pews at the back of the narthex where old folks and small children usually waited for their families to finish talking after church. Nicole’s mama helped her toward one, and she collapsed onto the red cushion, sobbing and gasping for breath. Skye’s younger daughter had certainly inherited his sense of drama.
I tottered after them and took a pew across the narrow aisle. “I’m MacLaren Yarbrough,” I told the woman. “A friend of the MacDonalds.”
“I’m Maisie Shandy,” she said again. “Pleased to meet you, but I wish it was under better circumstances.”
She put out her hand for me to shake, but I shook my head. “I’ve got a terrible cold, so I don’t want to touch you.”
“You know Nicole?” She patted her daughter on the back. Nicole didn’t lift her head.
“Oh, yes. Last time I saw her, she had just cut Laura MacDonald’s hair.”
“Nicole’s real good with hair,” her mother bragged. “When she finished her trainin’, she had offers from several places in Augusta—but she wanted to come on down here.”
“I wanted to get to know Daddy.” Nicole lifted her tear-drenched face and looked at me through flower eyes with blue centers and spiky lashes for petals.
Maisie had the grace to look embarrassed. “I wish I hadn’t ever told her who he was. But she kept beggin’ and beggin’, until she plumb wore me down.” She sighed. “At least you never told him who you were.” She added, anxiously, “Did you, honey?”
Nicole stood. “I need to go to the bathroom. Do you know where it is, Judge Yarbrough?”
“Down those stairs, then turn to the right.”
“Judge?” Her mother had noticed the word, so I explained about being a magistrate while Nicole clomped down the wooden stairs.
After that, her mother sighed. “I know you’re wonderin’ who the dickens I am, and”—she lifted both slim freckled hands, then let them drop in her lap—“everything.”
“I don’t need to know a thing. It’s none of my business,” I said—because Mama had raised me to be polite. The truth was, I was dying to know who the dickens she was and “everything.”
She looked toward the swinging doors. “Nicole has made it the whole town’s business. Somebody ought to know what really happened, in case wild stories start. And we can prove it, if that sheriff tries to make trouble.”
“He’s not the sheriff, he’s the police chief,” I corrected her, “and making trouble is what he does best. But I’ll do what I can to put a lid on it.”
Her beginning was unexpected. “Skye and I never meant a thing to each other, and that’s the truth. If his wife needs to hear it, I hope you’ll tell her. I used to work for a car dealer up in Augusta, and I’d see Skye when he came up on business. He was always real friendly and everything, so we’d laugh and talk, but that’s all there was until one night it was closin’ time when he got ready to go. He asked if I’d like to get a bite to eat before he drove home.” She bit her lip and looked at her hands. “I knew he was married, and I was going steady, but my boyfriend was a sailor and he’d been away on sea duty five months. I figured, ‘What the heck? It’s just dinner.’ Skye took me to a real nice place, and while we were eatin’, he talked about his wife—how much he loved her, and how pretty she was. Then he started goin’ on about how she was real sick right then and had to stay in bed all the time. Now you and I both know that was a line, but I was nineteen and hadn’t learned all the lessons life still had to teach me. One thing led to another, and after that he started comin’ up around one night a week. But we were both just lonely. We weren’t in love.”
She looked at me and waited for me to show I understood—maybe, even, condoned. I didn’t. Nineteen is old enough to have common sense and morals, and loneliness is seldom a fatal condition. I nodded just to move the story along.
“I wasn’t careful enough, obviously. When I knew Nicole was on the way, I was frantic. Skye was great, though. He said we needed to stop seeing each other, but for me to open a bank account and send him the deposit slips, and he’d put in enough to cover my hospital expenses, then he’d send a check every month until the child was eighteen. He did, too, even after I wrote him I was married and didn’t need his checks anymore.” She hesitated, then added, “I didn’t marry the sailor. I married Jack Shandy when Nicole was eighteen months old. He adopted her, and he’s always been her daddy. He’s never made a speck of difference between her and our other two.”
“Have you been ill? Nicole told Skye she needed a job because her mother was ill and she had to help support her family.”
Maisie gave me a rueful smile. “Nicole is always makin’ up stories. The truth is, she was just dyin’ to meet her daddy. I never meant to tell her about him, but when she turned fourteen, she pestered the livin’ daylights out of me to at least know who he was. She said I might die or somethin’ and she’d have no idea how to get her father’s medical history in case she developed a rare disease. Oh, she’s a smart one. So one night when Skye was doin’ a car commercial on television and it was just me and her in the house, I pointed and said, ‘There he is. That’s your daddy.’ I unleashed a monster. Have you ever said anything you’d give your right arm to take back?”
“Several times,” I conceded. I couldn’t help liking this woman, and could see why Skye had, too. I squelched that disloyal thought and concentrated on the rest of Maisie’s story.
“That’s how I felt about tellin’ Nicole about Skye. Especially since she kept pesterin’ me after that to know more and more. At last, I told her almost everythin’. I never dreamed she’d come down here to find him, though, as soon as she finished cosmetology school. She was gone all day, but I figured she was lookin’ for work. When she came home and said she’d come here and gotten herself a job in his dealership, I was sick with worry.”
“You didn’t need to worry. He liked me. He liked me a lot.”
We hadn’t heard Nicole coming back. She’d taken off her thick-soled sandals and come up in stocking feet. I hoped she was being considerate of the funeral, and not a sneak. She stood glaring down at us. “You were wrong about what I told him, too. I told him right off who I was, and I said I didn’t want anything from him or his family. I just wanted to get to know him, to see what I’d missed. It was him who thought up that story about me working to support my sick mother and her children. He thought that was funny, and said he’d have to have somethin’ to tell Laura, her bein’ in charge of hirin’ and firin’ people. He also said he’d always wanted three children, but his wife couldn’t have any more. I think after a while he’d have told his family who I was, when the time was right.”
I couldn’t imagine Skye working up that kind of courage, but Nicole stood with lifted chin, a golden tower of faith in Skye’s integrity and good intentions.
I felt sicker than I had all week.
In the sanctuary, the organ started playing “For All the Saints, Who From Their Labors Rest.” “The service is almost over,” I warned.
“We’re goin’.” Maisie grabbed Nicole’s arm and stood.
Nicole pulled away. “I want to go to the cemetery.”
“You are goin’ to your place to pack your bags,” her mother told her, “and you are comin’ home with me. Skye’s family doesn’t need you right now.”
“Laura likes me,” Nicole insisted.
“That was before you made that scene in there. Now, come on. We’re goin’ home.”
It was too late. Skye’s casket was already being wheeled through the door. Nicole sank beside her mother and sobbed. Her mother held her as best she could. I sat miserably on the adjacent pew and watched as the pallbearers and family marched behind it. Neither Laura nor Skye’s family noticed me, but Gwen Ellen threw me such a look of sad reproach, you’d have thought I was personally responsible for Nicole’s existence.
24
Walker and Cindy weren’t going to the cemetery, so they offered to run me home. Since I’d left my pocketbook under the pew, I waited until the crowd all came out, left Walker and Cindy talking to friends, and hurried back into the sanctuary. The music had stopped, and the air was settling back to the thick holiness that fills all empty churches on a weekday. Everybody was gone except Marilee Muller, who was staring at the front as if Skye were still there.
Embarrassed, I crept into the back pew and bent to retrieve my pocketbook, but somebody had kicked it way under. I had to get on my knees to grab it.
I jumped when I heard her speak. “I am not sorry.” Her voice was soft but urgent. “I am not sorry for one little thing. I have nothing to be sorry for.”
I grabbed my pocketbook strap and peered over the pew in front, thinking she was talking to me. She was still looking at the front, talking to air.
Her voice grew louder. “And I’m not going out there to watch her play Queen Bee. That’s all she’s got left. Let her have it.” She sprang to her feet and whirled into the aisle. When she saw me, her eyes widened and she froze.
“I had to get my pocketbook.” I dangled it from one hand and felt like an utter fool. “I forgot it.” I climbed to my feet and hoped she didn’t hear my knees pop.
“Oh, Judge Yarbrough.” She gushed as if I were one of her dearest friends, and sank to the cushion of the pew in front of mine like a graceful panther. “May I speak with you for a minute? I just have to talk to somebody, and you are such a sympathetic person.”
Where on earth did she get that idea?
“Besides”—she tucked her long legs underneath her and turned sideways, resting her arm over the back so she could face me—“I need some advice.”
I am a sucker for people asking my advice. It happens so seldom. So I sat down, wiggled to get comfortable, and prepared to help in any way I could. She had, by far, the more uncomfortable position, but managed to look glamorous even at that angle.
When she began, “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea or anything, but . . .” all my flags went up. She must know good and well I wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “Skye MacDonald and I were in love.” She gave a breathless little laugh.
She’d been right. If she expected me to say something, she’d be waiting a long time. She had plumb shut off my water—which was already running at a trickle after Nicole’s little drama.
She rested her left hand over her right on the back of the pew. I was looking at the poor knuckle encircled by even teeth prints until Marilee wiggled the bare third finger of her left hand. I’d never noticed before how strong her hands were, with long, thick fingers and dark red nails filed to talons. A predator’s hands that reached for what they wanted and seized it.
She must have interpreted my silence as astonishment, because she added with the smile that charmed thousands every night, “Really. We were.” She started nodding. So help me, I nodded back. Nods can be like yawns that way. “We never meant it to happen,” she added with boring predictability—as if other couples went out on Wednesday mornings and said, “Well, let’s fall in love.”
She continued in a confidential tone that implied I was one of the girlfriends she shared secrets with. “We had to work on that old committee for the college, you know, and being together so much—well, we realized we were absolute soul mates. I didn’t know love could be so wonderful. I used to send him little messages at the end of every broadcast, and nobody ever knew. That was our little secret.” She gave me another dazzling smile. I wondered where she had learned that. College? Acting school? Back in high school her smile had been more like a shadow, here one second and gone the next.
“When you saw us Friday, I’d told Skye I wanted him to give me a definite time when he’d inform his wife he wanted a divorce. I mean, there wasn’t any sense in putting it off, was there? As unpleasant as it was going to be, it had to be done. We were going to get married, and needed to make plans.” She heaved what could have been a heart-rending sigh if I’d felt like having my heart rended right then. “I’d even bought this suit for the wedding.” She stroked one of the white silk sleeves.
I considered mentioning that Skye already had a wife, and that telling her he was leaving would have been a lot more unpleasant for Gwen Ellen—and for Skye—than for Marilee, but I bit my tongue. After all, I was such a sympathetic person. Besides, here on a platter was another motive for murder. For once, Skye must have found himself in a real bind. Marilee wasn’t like Maisie. Barracudas don’t swim off just because you get tired of playing with them.
“Did he call you Friday afternoon?” I asked, adding, “I remember you asked him to.”
“Oh, yes. He said he wouldn’t tell her until after Sunday. They had some little anniversary that day, and he didn’t want to spoil it for her. I got real mad at the time, but now . . . well, that was just like him, wasn’t it? He was the sweetest, most considerate man in the world.”
He wasn’t winning my vote at the moment. Fortunately, she wasn’t looking for a reply. All she really needed from me was an ear. If I could have detached it, the rest of me would have gone back home to bed.
She dabbed her eyes with a wisp of lacy white handkerchief. “I don’t think I can live without Skye. I honestly don’t think I can.”
She was utterly besotted. Also selfish. And dumb.
“I knew we couldn’t get married for a few months, of course,” she admitted. “People can act real funny, you know?”
I knew some people who would have acted funny if Skye had paraded a glamorous young wife around Hopemore with Gwen Ellen still alive and kicking. Me, for one.
Marilee went rippling on. “This is what I wanted your advice about, though. With Skye gone, I don’t know how I ought to go about telling folks. I mean, I don’t want to hurt his wife, but in fairness to Skye, I think people ought to know he loved me. What do you think?”