Doing It at the Dixie Dew Page 6

  “If you’re going to that auction,” Ida Plum said, “eat a big breakfast first.”

  “Sounds like you’re mothering me,” I teased, and refilled my own coffee cup.

  “Somebody’s got to. You go running around in the dark, finding dead people and getting hauled into the police station in the middle of the night.”

  So I ate and dressed and was brushing my teeth when I heard Scott’s truck, and his two-note whistle, at the back door.

  “Ida Plum Dumpling.” He circled her waist as she stood at the stove. “How come you never got married again?”

  “Well, it wasn’t because I wasn’t asked,” she said. “Maybe they never said it in the right way. And with the right jewelry.” She laughed.

  Scott poured himself juice. “Oh, I see. Mr. Right has to say it the right way at the right time in the right place.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Ida Plum said as I came in the kitchen. She set a place on the sunporch for Mr. Lucas. One end was straightened up and he’d have a view of the back garden. Maybe he wouldn’t notice the screen I had hiding my small collection of unpainted tables and chairs. They sat stacked in an assortment of styles and finishes.

  On the way to the auction Scott drove down country roads in a part of the county I didn’t know or, if I did, had long ago forgotten. Dust stormed up behind him and James Galway played flute on the tape deck. Somehow I expected guitar or ballads or Willie Nelson, something in bluegrass. This was a paradox. There was a lot I didn’t know about Scott, a whole book, a lifetime.

  That gap of years when I had been away in that foreign land “up North.” Where had he been? What had he been doing?

  But the way he steered me through the crowd he seemed to know auctions and people. The auctioneer tipped his white straw hat as Scott and I walked past the crowd already seated under the trees.

  We inspected chairs in a row beside the barn. There were two sets of four that matched, plus some odd ones missing rungs and seats. “I can’t afford to have the seats caned,” I said.

  “Not to worry,” Scott said. “I know the county’s best caner and he’s reasonable. Plus he takes MasterCard.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, trying to check out the condition of some tables heaped high with glassware. One table had a tin top and turned legs.

  I straightened up and stepped back into someone walking past. “Oops, sorry,” I said. The woman in black slacks pushed past the crowd. A beefy-type fellow in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt followed close behind her, holding her elbow. He brushed past so close I felt the hair on his arms and got a whiff of yesterday’s sweat. Somewhere I’d seen the woman before. But where? I hadn’t been that many places lately in Littleboro.

  Scott had gone to register for a bidding number and I tried not to stare at the couple, who stood away from the crowd in the shade of the barn.

  Father Roderick. I remembered suddenly. That woman was with Father Roderick in the vestibule after Miss Lavinia’s funeral. She was the one brushing lint off his jacket in that strange wifely intimate way.

  “What?” Scott came up beside me. He poked his bidding card in his shirt pocket, left the number showing.

  “That woman by the barn,” I said out loud. “Don’t look now, but in a minute.”

  “The one in black?” Scott said. “That’s Father Roderick’s housekeeper, Debbie. Debbie Delinger.”

  “Oh,” I said, as if that explained something. Maybe even half of something. When I looked again, they were gone.

  Scott got the bid on the chairs. Ten dollars each, but the long tin-covered table was $250.

  “It wasn’t worth fifty,” I said. “You’re nuts to pay that much.”

  “Those things are considered primitive pieces,” Scott said. “And the only way you can get a buy is if nobody at an auction knows what it is.”

  “Wonder what Father Roderick’s housekeeper thought she’d find at the auction?” I asked as Scott and I unloaded chairs in the backyard. The first thing we’d do was scrub and hose down years of accumulated crud off the chairs, then sand and mend and tighten legs and rungs, and finally the chairs would be ready for paint.

  “Some people go to auctions just to be going,” Scott said. “It’s entertainment.”

  “That housekeeper and her sidekick didn’t look like the type on the prowl for that type of entertainment,” I said, remembering the housekeeper’s tight pants and top, her long ropes of limp and greasy hair, the blue bruised-looking tattoos on her companion’s arms.

  Scott laughed. “Who knows what goes on in this town?” he asked as he hooked up the water hose.

  Ida Plum swept up the walk. “You been spied on,” she said.

  “Mr. Lucas?” I had a sinking feeling. “That’s not fair.”

  “He sat in his car in front of the house a long time this morning,” Ida Plum said. “And I think he took a photograph.”

  “I wasn’t even here to do the hostess bit, bid him good-bye, ask how he slept and all those gold-star things,” I moaned. “Do you think it was one of the B-and-B directories, a guidebook or what?” I had written them all for a listing, begging for a visit, a call, a notation. I didn’t dream they’d come on the sly.

  “I think he slept well, enjoyed your pineapple muffins, approved of your ‘Think Pink’ tearoom and liked your grandmother’s house in general.”

  “You did all the hostess things,” I said, and hugged her. “Thank you.”

  “He even poked around the attic,” Ida Plum said. “And looked in Miss Lavinia’s bedroom. I heard him.”

  “But that’s not—”

  “They said it was okay to clean it, so I did. The detective was through with it. Thank goodness I didn’t have to explain a locked door and tell anyone the life and death story of Miss Lavinia Lovingood.”

  I took the broom from Ida Plum and swept cobwebs off the chairs. “What if he wasn’t from anything connected with a bed-and-breakfast at all?”

  “Don’t think about it,” Scott said. “Scrub that chair, fill that pail, kill that spider—”

  “What spider?” I lifted my broom high, wished I’d been home to aim it at this Lucas guy, the nerve of him looking in my attic, taking pictures. And if he wasn’t with a bed-and-breakfast directory, who was he?

  Chapter Seven

  One of the things I liked best about a small town was church bells on Sunday mornings. I loved the clean silver sound of them. I remembered how I felt hearing them as a child: that God was in His Heaven and all was right with the world in general and Littleboro in particular.

  So, in jeans, sneakers and a sweatshirt, hands in my pockets, I walked toward the drugstore for a Raleigh News & Observer. On Sundays I wanted a fat newspaper that would last at least an hour. Overhead, the sky was an innocent blue with only a scant pastureful of cloud lambs and sheep. The April air was still morning wet and smelled of lilacs, dew wet and past their prime.

  At St. Ann of the Oaks services went on as usual with a substitute priest for the day and Miss Tempie torturing the organ. Faint sounds of its agony wafted from behind the pale blue door.

  “No rest for the weary,” Malinda Jones said from the pharmacy window at the drugstore. “Some of us have to work Sundays.” Since I’d been back in Littleboro I’d been too busy picking up the pieces of my current life, and trying to survive, fix up the Dixie Dew, and start a business to really catch up with old friends. And Malinda the same, full-time job plus a baby.

  I tucked the thick Sunday News & Observer under my arm. “I know what you mean. How’s Elvis?”

  “Fat and sassy.” Malinda poked a pencil in her black hair pulled into a round biscuit of a bun on top of her head. Malinda had been the first black (and female) student body president in high school. Not only pretty, she was also smart and the only girl from the class to get a full scholarship to med school at UNC–Chapel Hill. She ended up getting her degree in pharmacy. I wondered if she’d ever regretted not going on to med school. Had that dream gotten sidetracked into a marri
age that didn’t work? Just left with a child and the choice of taking on a fast-track career with some huge conglomerate of a drug company or coming back to Littleboro to live with her mama and have some help raising him? Whatever Malinda’s reasons, they were none of my business.

  “How old is he now?” I asked. Malinda had shown me pictures the first time I was in the drugstore.

  “Twenty months,” Malinda said. “And my mama is spoiling him rotten. If she didn’t love to teach, she would have taken leave and kept him this winter. This way she’s only got three months to undo all the good that nursery has done.”

  I laughed. Rosalie Jones was one of the few black teachers in the system, and a good one, too. Margaret Alice had all the respect in the world for her. “That woman deserves a better school system than we got here. She’d be principal or in administration anywhere else,” Mama Alice said.

  “Any chance she’ll move up?” I had asked.

  “This school system’s too small,” Margaret Alice said. “One high school. That’s only a few administrative jobs and the coaches get those. They figure a man has to support a family. No matter that women do, too, this school board will never see it that way.”

  “Tell your mama hey for me,” I told Malinda as I headed toward the register. Rosalie Jones had been my favorite teacher in sixth grade at Littleboro Elementary. She was one reason I majored in elementary education and taught elementary art myself until last year. Until my grandmother’s death had brought me home and the Dixie Dew gave me reason to stay. I’d had offers to sell, but selling would be considered only when I was on my next-to-last breath. The offers had come in long legal envelopes on stationery so crisp it rattled like danger when I unfolded it. They were from some legal firm whose name took the two top rows of the letterhead and written “on behalf of a client who wishes to remain unnamed at the moment.” The offers were insultingly cheap and I told myself I’d be down to my last dime before I’d give away the only piece of real life I had left.

  I rounded the courthouse corner and stopped for the circle traffic when I saw someone walking past the closed double doors of First Presbyterian Church. A woman in a long red dress hoofed down Main Street, swinging a black pocketbook on a chain. She swung that pocketbook as if she saw something overhead and wanted to knock it down and “stomp it flat,” as the saying went. Reba, it could be nobody else. She’s off again, I thought. Off to wherever her mind went when it got out of whack.

  I walked behind her down the block. Crazy Reba owned the world at this moment. She had it on the chain of her pocketbook and was swinging it. For a moment I envied her careless joy, her wild, childlike, just plain efflorescence in just being alive. Reba heard all the birds and called back to them in their language, a singsong of sounds and phrases. “Thief, thief,” she yelled to the blue jay.

  “Thief, thief, thief!” the jay screamed back, then joined two other jays in a tree, and all of them sang, “Thief, thief, thief.”

  Reba stopped under the tree and flapped her arms, waved the pocketbook, and the birds shot out like blue sparks in all directions. She laughed and laughed, bent down and beat the sidewalk with the purse.

  I glanced at the newspaper’s headlines as I walked, half-listening to Reba’s blue-jay screeches and dove coos, until I reached my own driveway and started toward the sunporch door.

  Reba stopped at the front walk, stared at the house, then plopped down mightily, a heap of red melting into a blob. She took off her shoes and scratched her feet.

  Oh God, I thought, she’ll be there all day and anybody considering the Dixie Dew will take one look at her and drive away as fast as they can. Reba was not the advertising I needed. I backed out my yellow Volkswagen Beetle, Lady Bug, slowed and rolled down my window. “Reba, can I give you a ride?”

  Reba got up and walked to the car. She held a spike-heeled shoe in each hand: one black, one white. “You going to Vegas?” she yelled with a broad smile that showed the gap between her teeth where some were missing in front.

  “I’ll take you home,” I said.

  Reba looked as though she didn’t know me from anybody, but it didn’t matter. To her, a total stranger was a whole new opportunity.

  “I can go there by myself,” Reba said, and pointed toward her tree on the hill.

  I thought Reba might be staying at the new group home; she looked clean, her hair freshly washed and combed smooth. Then I remembered Verna Crowell had warned me soon after I came back to Littleboro. “Keep your doors locked,” Verna had whispered. “Reba just comes in and helps herself to your bathroom. She’ll crawl in your tub, take a shower, help herself to all the soap and shampoo and hot water you got. Then she leaves a trail of wet towels out the door.”

  Verna went on to say that Reba had really scared her once. “I heard all this water running in my own bathroom and I wasn’t in it. I knew there was no one in that house but me and I wasn’t in the tub. I tell you, it’s a funny feeling. Then Reba comes out, drying herself, singing up a storm.”

  “Take me to Vegas.” Reba hit the side of my car with her shoe. “I said take me to Vegas, you car, you.”

  I reached for my gearshift but was afraid to start forward. Reba might step in front of the car. No telling what she’d do.

  “I wanna see my name in lights.” Reba looked at the sky. One eye looked too far left and toward the back of her head. I wondered what she really saw. Did she sleep or wander the streets all night? “I got my clothes all packed,” Reba said. “A whole suitcase. Jesus give me a new suitcase. A new suitcase just like Selena Gomez got. I saw her on TV at the truck stop.”

  I had heard Reba hung around truck stops on the Interstate and hitched rides with truck drivers. She liked to ride. She’d ride anywhere. For a while she had a car, slept in it parked behind the Exxon station. Then it had been towed to the junkyard and Reba slept there until they locked her out. She hauled in too much food from the garbage cans at Kentucky Fried and attracted rats and mice.

  “I’ll take you to Kentucky Fried,” I said, wondering if that would work, if I could get Reba’s mind going in another direction. And if I’d be able to get her out of the car afterward.

  Reba crawled into the backseat, pulling her pocketbook after. “I want the big bucket,” she said, “and a dozen biscuits, extra gravy and coleslaw.” She gave her order to the air, then kept repeating it like a poem, “Big bucket, dozen biscuits …

  “Jesus give me this necklace and earrings,” Reba sang. “And a whole lot more.”

  Reba frequented yard sales, I heard, took anything anybody gave her, sold it from her old car as long as she had it. I had seen her parked at wide, shady places beside the roads, car trunk open and “stuff” spilling out. Somebody in town had probably given her junk jewelry to get rid of her. The necklace and earrings Reba wore looked old, heavy and discolored. The green stones shone like glass. Tacky. No wonder Reba thought she had something. And the Jesus bit. She could have gotten the stuff at a church yard sale, associated the church with Jesus.

  Reba stayed in the car while I bought chicken: the big bucket with biscuits that Reba wanted. I handed them to her and she immediately opened the bucket and began to eat.

  I put Lady Bug into gear and started toward home with the idea in my mind that Reba would take her chicken and head toward her tree to eat in the shade. Lord help me if she decided my front porch looked like a better place. But as we passed the cemetery Reba yelled, “Stop.” And I was only too glad to do so.

  “I want out here.” She tried to open the door before I could pull over. “I want to eat with her.”

  “Who?” I said. “Wait a minute.” I didn’t see anyone, but Reba was out with her chicken, swinging her pocketbook and heading up the gravel path to the trees on the hill in the cemetery. I didn’t see another soul in the cemetery, but knowing Reba, “her” could have been a bird or a statue or a tree or a shrub. She was one with all the elements.

  In my own driveway, I sat a moment. I probably shouldn’t have le
t Reba in the car, nor bought her chicken. This Reba was one I never knew, someone wound up with an energy that could do damage, become violent. I remembered how hard Reba had hit the car. When I got out to check, sure enough, there was a rounded fist-sized dent in the front fender. Reba had strong hands and a mind that went in all kinds of directions. Who knew what she could or would do? Could she strangle Father Joe and walk over his body like a pile of wet towels? Never look back or realize what she’d done? Go on to somebody else? It scared me to think about it. I’d been too close to two murder victims lately, two more than I’d ever been close to in my life, and I didn’t feel too good about it.

  Chapter Eight

  Monday I scraped peeling paint from the doors to the sunporch, tearoom-to-be. The paint dusted and flaked all over me. My hair and my jeans and T-shirt were covered. My scraper made harsh, rasping noises as I worked. All this to get a surface ready to receive new paint. It would be worth it. Nothing seemed as clean and new as fresh paint. I even loved the smell of fresh paint. Besides, my job was better than Scott’s project for the day. I heard a rumble on the roof, waited to see if he’d come sliding off, chimney-cleaning brushes at his sides like ski poles.

  He’d closed off the fireplaces in all the rooms and gone on the roof with rags, rods, twisted black bristle brooms and brushes. There was no one in town to hire to do it and the chimneys had to be cleaned before the fireplace people came to start rebuilding them. “Be careful,” I said when I heard any thumps and scuttles overhead.

  I scraped and thought of Father Roderick. His body was being flown back to California, but the church here was holding a memorial service tonight. I wondered who’d conduct it. Who’d play the organ? Miss Tempie? Of course, she had for years … forever. Aged and slow, her fingers slipped and hit wrong notes in every piece she played. I’d groaned the last time I went to St. Ann’s with Mama Alice. “Why in the world don’t they get someone to play the organ who knows how?”