Doing It at the Dixie Dew Read online

  “That mansion,” I said, remembering the wedding cake of a house that presided on the block behind the courthouse. For years it sat empty, never sold or rented. Miss Lavinia must have kept the taxes paid from wherever she was. Every year it fell down more and there were always the stories of how haunted it was and kids daring each other to go in, spend the night, et cetera. It finally got so covered with kudzu the garden clubs petitioned to have it torn down. That was about the time the county ran out of office space in the courthouse, bought the lot and built the annex, a redbrick building with skylights and a fountain in the courtyard that taxpayers still grumbled about being a waste.

  “Do you know if she ever came back over the years?”

  “She may have kept in touch with certain ones. I wasn’t in that crowd. She’s your grandmother’s generation.”

  “Here I go,” I said. “It’s almost noon. Surely she won’t be upset if I wake her now.”

  The upstairs hall was so quiet I even found myself tiptoeing though nobody was in the other three bedrooms.

  I tapped lightly on the door and called, “Miss Lavinia!”

  There wasn’t a sound. Not even a soft snore or a little cough. Everything was too quiet.

  Ida Plum came up the stairs, arms full of sheets for the linen closet. “Maybe she’s hard of hearing. Did you knock hard enough?”

  I knocked again, hard and loud. The old door thumped and rattled. My fist actually ached, I’d knocked so hard.

  Still no answer. No sound of movement inside. Nothing.

  I knocked, called, knocked again.

  Ida Plum nudged me aside and inserted the master key from its nail in the linen closet.

  Miss Lavinia wasn’t in bed. The room seemed to be empty. I noticed the window was open and my new lace curtains getting damp from the blowing rain. I ran to close the window and almost tripped over Miss Lavinia. She lay in a twisted lump of pink satin between the bed and the white wicker desk, one arm under and one arm out, a piece of paper nearby. The bouquet of lilacs, white tulips and Mama Alice’s parsley I’d used for greenery was overturned and scattered across the floor. Miss Lavinia’s satin slippers stood beside the bed and her matching robe lay across a chair. Her book and glasses were on the bedside table.

  I touched her shoulder, a shoulder so cold I felt it through the fabric. “Oh.” I pulled back.

  Ida Plum reached around me, took Miss Lavinia’s lace-covered wrist and felt for a pulse. “None,” she said. “Better call nine-one-one. They’ll get Eikenberry’s.”

  The funeral home? Oh God, I thought, Oh … my … God.

  “The phone.” Ida Plum put both hands on my shoulders, turned me around and marched me from the room, aimed me toward the stairs. Then she closed Miss Lavinia’s bedroom door, locked it tight, but not before I’d grabbed the piece of paper off the floor and shoved it in my pocket. I had even started to pick up the flowers before Ida Plum pulled me away. Some things you just do without thinking. It’s like automatic pilot takes over. Then someone reminds you where you are and what has happened.

  In the end, Ida Plum was the one to call 9ll. I stood in the kitchen shivering like a New England winter.

  I pulled the paper from my pocket and read two words scribbled in Miss Lavinia’s handwriting scrawled haphazardly across the page. “That is…” That is what? I asked. What?

  I heard the MedAlert leave the fire station, wailing. The wailing got closer and louder and my grandmother’s expression “loud enough to wake the dead” kept playing in my mind.

  Except nothing would ever wake Miss Lavinia again.

  Chapter Two

  “This town loves a funeral,” I said. In the years I’d been away I’d forgotten exactly how much a funeral was an occasion in Littleboro. The funeral home, where the “viewing” took place, was a social gathering and the line of cars down Main Street was a status symbol. “Cars were parked clear down to the schoolhouse,” or, “Honey, I stood in line for over an hour. I’ve never seen such a crowd,” people said at the beauty shop and grocery store. Somehow I couldn’t quite see that sort of picture for Miss Lavinia Lovingood. It was hard to imagine who would be at her viewing or funeral.

  My grandmother, Margaret Alice McKenzie, who raised me, used to say this town went all out for a funeral. Every weekend come pouring rain, blasting sunshine or icy-fingered sleet, there’s somebody out on the bypass selling artificial funeral wreaths. Wreaths with every color flower nature never made and ribbons that accuse or get to your guilt with sayings like “Remember Mama” or “Daddy, Gone but Not Forgotten” or “We Love You, Grandpa.” I try to look the other way as I drive by, though there’s not a ribbon that spells out my sins or advertises my guilt. Not one “Welcome Home, Prodigal Daughter” in the bunch.

  Ida Plum laid a stack of sheets on the kitchen counter, cotton sheets, line dried, ironed. They smelled smooth and old-fashioned and as if somebody cared, a sweet-smelling bed. Had Miss Lavinia even noticed? Had it been a quick death? I felt a little chill remembering and wrapped my arms around myself.

  “Would you look at all the cakes?” Scott stood at my kitchen table. “There’s six layer cakes and two pound cakes.” He counted like a child eyeing a picnic. Scott had become, by default, my contractor/go-to guy/general-knowledge person about restoring an ailing house. He had come to my rescue just as I was about to give up, give in and go. Go where? Anywhere but here.

  When I first started on the Dixie Dew, I’d hired Jake Renfroe, somebody Verna Crowell from next door had said was “good.” Later I remembered Verna Crowell had said this with a giggle and her hand half over her mouth. Good at what? I should have asked her. Good at sending me faster toward rack and ruin?

  Jake Renfroe would order materials that piled up on my porch and then not show up to do anything with them. Meanwhile, bills kept coming in for all he’d charged in my name. Finally I picked up the phone and fired him. He’d cried. It’s hard to hear an old man blubber over the phone, but I held firm.

  Then Ida Plum said call Scott Smith. I did. He came and we’d been working together ever since.

  Now Scott stood here in my kitchen eyeing the cakes under various wraps and foils as if they were trophies. Verna rang the back bell at six this morning, carrot cake in hand. “I’m so sorry to hear about Lavinia. Such a loss,” she said.

  Verna lived in two rooms in a fifteen-room house that decayed more every day. Her house was a few years older than Mama Alice’s and until the last ten years had been kept freshly painted and in good repair. The Crowells had money, but Verna wasn’t about to spend it on heat in the winter or air-conditioning in the summer or paint and plaster and repairs. She was probably one of those “little old ladies” whom Father Roderick’s charm was wooing out of all they had.

  I didn’t know what to say. I’d never met Miss Lavinia Lovingood before she decided to come to this house and die. Miss Lovingood had looked so awful when Ida Plum and I found her, all doubled over, her hair in a tangle and her face frozen in such agony. And so cold. I got goose bumps every time I thought about it.

  “Lavinia Lovingood and I were girls together,” Verna said, then added before I could begin to count, “even if she was a good deal older. Of course we hadn’t kept in touch. Not for years. Not until she wrote me.”

  “Wrote you?”

  “About a month ago.” Verna reached down and pinched off a dead tulip bloom. “You keep a bulb groomed and they’ll last longer.”

  “I don’t understand.” I felt like putting out my hand to stop any more tulip molesting.

  “Wrote she’d be in Littleboro three days and come by to see me. Said we’d talk old times, catch up on our lives.” Verna turned, started across the porch. “Now look what it’s come to. But that’s what we all come down to in the end, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t know any answers except to extend the cake back in Verna’s direction. “Please,” I said. “You keep it.”

  But Verna insisted. “Beth, honey, you don’t know when you’ll nee
d it. At times like this you just don’t know what you’ll need.” She patted my hand with her soft, old, wrinkled, spotted one. “After all, what are neighbors for, if not at a time like this?” A dark, hairy mole on Verna’s cheek wiggled when she smiled. I’d seen that mole all my life, wondered why it never got any bigger. When I was little, I thought it looked for all the world like a bug and would crawl off any minute.

  Lord,” I said after Verna left. “Word spreads fast. Around here all you have to do is whisper and it’s all over town.”

  “Who could miss it?” Ida Plum stacked sheets in the linen closet. “It’s hard not to notice an ambulance backed up to a house, a body being hauled out in broad daylight.”

  Miss Lavinia had looked so natural. Just old, eighty plus, maybe heading hard toward ninety. People die in their sleep, I told myself. She just happened to be a guest and sleeping in my house when it happened.

  “That’s the way I want to go,” Florence Carelock said when she came to the back door with her Lemon Creme Delight Cake. “It’s such a peaceful thing. Of course we don’t get to choose, but if we could, that’s what I’d want.”

  I tried to give back the cake.

  “I have been your grandmother’s friend all these years,” she said, “and I want to do this much to help you out.”

  If you want to help me out, I thought, you’d let me forget this ever happened in my house. You’d help me get clean linens on some beds, vacuuming done and guests welcomed and checked in. But I only smiled and thanked Florence.

  Four cakes came in after that. Delmore Simpson brought a pound cake, and the preacher, John Pittman from the Presbyterian church, brought another. His wife always kept a cake in the freezer for such emergencies, he said, and her name was already taped to the bottom of the plate, though there was no hurry getting the plate back.

  It’s not an emergency, I wanted to say. By this time, though, I’d learned to accept these food gifts and be grateful. Plus gracious. That was the least I could be. People meant well, I supposed. But in the back of my mind, I also wondered how much was simply curiosity and a cake was a ticket in the door.

  “I wanted to go over some of the plans with you,” Pastor Pittman said.

  “Me?” I said. “What plans?”

  “The funeral services for Lavinia Lovingood are to be at First Church and I thought Thursday would be a better day to do it than Friday. We’re not supposed to have rain and I already have a golf date that morning and a wedding at four in the afternoon. Of course we don’t want to wait until Saturday or Sunday … that’s much too long, I think, don’t you?”

  “For who?” I said, though of course I knew. Miss Lavinia. But who decided these things? Surely she had family somewhere. Cousins? Nieces, nephews? Somebody? A life she left for a few days that had now become a life she left forever.

  “All her family is in Littleboro Cemetery. There was so little of it really. She’s the last, I suppose.” He penciled in his appointment book. “Two o’clock suit you? We could make it three?”

  “I didn’t know her,” I said.

  “But of course you want to be at her services,” Pastor Pittman said. “After all, she passed in this house … your house, your grandmother’s house.”

  “That was an accident,” I said.

  “Sad, but it can be expected,” Pastor Pittman said. “The Lovingoods were one of the founding families, foremost families, if I might call them that, of Littleboro. You ought to read our church history. Lavinia was the only child, the last of the Lovingoods, and she’d been away from this town over fifty years.” He looked sweetly at me, gave a strained, patient smile. “Why, her family gave four of the eight stained-glass windows in our church … surely you’ve noticed. The Herringfield Windows.”

  Herringfields? Lovingoods? I thought. Where did they fit together?

  “The wife’s family,” Pastor Pittman said. “They were the wealthy ones originally, and all the windows were given in old Mrs. Lovingood’s maiden name.”

  Pittman was the pastor at First Presbyterian, but Miss Lavinia had been having tea with Father Roderick at St. Ann’s. Why? Had she converted when she lived in Italy? I could see that. Maybe she even saw the Vatican every time she looked out her window. Maybe she even had tea with the Pope on occasion. Who knows? I guess now we’d never know.

  “Oh.” I remembered the stained-glass windows at church, two on each side of the pulpit. I’d spent a lot of Sunday mornings of my life until I went away to art school staring at Jesus in the Garden, his red flowing robe; Jesus in the Temple with the cat-o’-nine tails; Jesus suffering the little children (Mama Alice explained the scriptures on that one for years) and Jesus with the woman at the well.

  Mama Alice had been a lapsed Catholic and First Presbyterian had the best youth group, so I went to both churches. Early Mass at St. Ann’s, then regular service at First Church so I could go to Youth Group that night and on Wednesdays. It was the only social life for teens in Littleboro. My friend Malinda had done the same except she and her mom, Rosalie, had been pillars of St. Ann’s.

  “One always wants to come home, doesn’t one?” Pittman said. A slight smile played at a corner of his mouth. He drummed his appointment book. “No matter how far one goes, home is still the place you want to come back to.”

  He left through the front door and admired the leaded fanlight as he went. “You’re doing wonders with this old house,” he said. “Paint really perks things up.” Paint and the sweat putting it on, I wanted to say, plus what it cost. “I think it would have been cheaper to just cover it with money … paste on bills like wallpaper,” Ida Plum said once.

  I closed the door. Mama Alice always kept the glass door panels curtained, but I liked them bare, more light in the gloomy hall, on that dark curving staircase. Sunday evening Lavinia Lovingood had gone up those stairs alive, Monday afternoon she had been carried down dead. I turned quickly toward the kitchen where Scott and Ida Plum sat eating cake. “This Lemon Creme is heaven on a plate,” he said. “There ought to be a law against doing something this good with food.” He sliced another piece, slid extra icing off the knife with his finger, then licked his finger, closed his eyes and smiled.

  “So what do I do with the rest of them?” I asked.

  “How are you fixed for freezer space?” Ida Plum asked. “You could be in the tearoom business tomorrow.” Ida Plum was on my side. Bless her. By converting the glassed-in side porch into a usable space, I would not only provide breakfast-eating space for the overnight guests but also be able to serve light lunches and snacks. The tearoom would provide extra income … after it got started and business built up. Mama Alice had been known as the best cook in Littleboro. She catered weddings, bridesmaids’ luncheons and monthly meals for various civic clubs in town. In addition to the house, she’d left me a treasured hoard of tried and truly great recipes.

  “This funeral business,” Scott said. “I’m surprised Ed Eikenberry didn’t put a wreath of white flowers on the door and some signs out front. He loves to advertise. In fact, I’ve never seen anybody enjoy the way they make their living quite as much as Ed Eikenberry.”

  “Oh, he wanted to,” Ida Plum said. “I stopped him.”

  “Thank God,” I said. “That’s all I need to greet arriving guests. Word would spread fast in the B-and-B business. ‘Come to the Dixie Dew and Die,’ or ‘At the Dixie Dew They Do You In.’ Can’t you just see it? ‘At the Dixie Dew We Specialize in Resting in Peace.’”

  “You could add an ‘R.I.P.’ on your logo,” Scott said. “Or ‘For Your Final Rest, Dixie Dew Is the Best.’” He drew a banner in the air with his hands.

  Ida Plum hooted from the hall, then went upstairs.

  I laughed and laughed until my cheeks burned and my eyes watered. “Stop, stop. It’s not funny. It’s awful.”

  “You’re right,” Scott said. He put his plate in the dishwasher. “But don’t let the ghosts get to you. The Guilt Ghosts. None of it’s your fault. It could happen to anyone,
anywhere, anytime. The Dixie Dew and you weren’t singled out as a spot on the map for Miss Lavinia’s demise.” He wrapped cakes for the freezer, put his name on the label of the chocolate pound cake and drew a skull and crossbones underneath.

  “Scott!” I said.

  “Don’t get rattled. That’s just to ensure this baby is mine. In case anybody robs freezers.”

  “Nobody robs freezers. Or if they do, they take roasts and steaks. Not chocolate cakes.”

  “Insurance,” he said, and started to the basement to Mama Alice’s freezers. The freezers were two oversized commercial units that stood side by side like giant white coffins. Mama Alice bought them when a restaurant in Raleigh went out of business. She got them for a song, she always said, and in the catering business she said they saved her life. She baked weeks ahead for a party or wedding reception.

  Ida Plum had gone upstairs to vacuum. The door to Miss Lavinia’s room was sealed and would be left that way for a while; even the bed was not to be changed. Police Chief Oswald DelGardo had sent his best and brightest, Bruce Bechner, over with the crime scene tape Monday night. Bruce bustled about like he was sealing off a presidential suite. That still left plenty to do, and who knew what tonight would bring? I didn’t want to think about it. One dead guest in my bed-and-breakfast had been one too many.

  “Honest,” I said. “It wouldn’t help business if word got out in the trade. Three days in business, I’m trying to get listed in the guidebooks and registers, approved by the B-and-B national board, and zonk, I have a death on my hands.”

  “Forget it,” Scott said as he put the pineapple cake in the refrigerator. He surprised me being so easy to work with in a kitchen, but then he lived alone (I assumed) and was used to the ways of a kitchen. He seemed at ease here, almost from the first day. Instead of bringing a thermos of coffee from home, he brought coffees, freshly ground cinnamon and mocha coffees, hazelnut, amaretto, rum and almond, and made them here.

  “Since when did any grocery store in Littleboro go gourmet?” I asked.