An Angel to Die For (3 page)

Clyde Simmons of Simmons and Griggs momentarily lost his staid undertaker’s demeanor when I called and told him about the grave. “You mean it’s
gone
? They haven’t already moved it, have they? I didn’t think your aunt had decided about that for sure.”

I told him if they’d moved Uncle Faris, I didn’t know where they’d put him.

“Dear God in heaven! Don’t tell me this is happening again. Had a wave of freakish incidents like that about seven or eight years ago—high school kids into some kind of cult silliness—but the sheriff put an end to that. Sounds like a new crop of meanness brewing.

“Your mom did come to see me a few weeks ago about the possibility of having that grave moved when they put a road through there,” he added. “Not a bad thing, really. I’ve noticed that lower part of your lot’s been eroding. Too much wash comes down. I told Virginia we’d do it whenever Zorah gave the word; your mother said she’d let us know.” His voice became soothing, more in-charge. “I hope you’ve notified the sheriff about this, Prentice. Somebody’s up to something worse than mischief here.” He hesitated. “And don’t you be going back over there alone.”

I sat at the oak trestle table in a spot of winter sun and turned my coffee mug in my hands while Noodles washed her paws on the hearth. What if whoever was doing this came back again? Maybe next time for Dad or Maggie. Or me. I felt sick as I phoned the sheriff.

“Mighty good coffee,” Deputy Weber said, shoving his cup aside. Again I sat at the kitchen table, this time with the policeman across from me in the place my sister used to sit. “Now, when was the last time you were in that area where we saw the grave?”

“The last of December when we buried my sister,” I said. “The twenty-ninth.”

“I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it. Donald Weber had been in the class several years ahead of ours and had married a friend of mine soon after high school. I thought him good-looking then, and he was
still attractive although he was beginning to lose his hair.

“And you haven’t been back since then?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to go there. “I’ve only been home a few days,” I said, explaining that I’d been living in Atlanta. “But my mother was here until about two weeks ago when they got my sister’s stone in place. I’m sure she would’ve seen something as obvious as that.”

“Hard to tell because of yesterday’s rain, and we had that hard freeze last week. Any footprints would’ve been washed away, but I believe this happened within the last couple of days.” He flicked a look at me. “You might’ve interrupted something, you know.”

I nodded. I didn’t need reminding.

He frowned. “And there’s nobody here but you?”

I could hear Augusta rocking in my mother’s old cane-bottomed chair in the parlor, but the deputy must not have noticed. “My mother’s staying in Savannah for a while,” I told him, “and the house has been closed for a couple of weeks.”

“You haven’t noticed anyone around who shouldn’t be?”

I started to tell him about Augusta, but I didn’t want to share her. Not yet. Maybe it was for the same reason I hadn’t mentioned her to Aunt Zorah. If Augusta Goodnight had sinister motives, I wasn’t ready to deal with it.

“When I first got here I found that sorry Jasper Totherow making himself at home in our barn,” I told him.
“Claimed my mother asked him to keep an eye on the house, but I know better.” I picked up the saltshaker—the one shaped like a rabbit I had bought at the dime store when I was eight—and brought it down hard on the table. “I told him to take a hike!”

“Have you told your mother about this?” He glanced about the room.

“In a roundabout way. Didn’t want to alarm her. I did check to see if she’d asked anybody to keep an eye on the place, and she said Suzie Wright promised to have a look around when she came by to feed the cat.

“Suzie delivers our mail,” I explained. “Lives about a mile down the road.”

“Jasper Totherow.
He is bad news
,” the deputy said. “Wife finally filed a complaint against him, learned the hard way, I reckon. Wish I had a dollar for every time we’ve been called out to their place.”

Ralphine Totherow rented a small house a few miles away and supported the couple’s two children by cleaning other people’s houses, including ours from time to time. I remembered Mom telling me she had her out to Smokerise just before Christmas. After Dad died, she didn’t have the heart for the usual holiday flurry, she said. And that was probably the last time the house had been cleaned, I thought. Until Augusta came. From what my mother told me, Ralphine Totherow didn’t receive any financial help from her husband. Didn’t want it, she said. All she wanted was to be rid of him.

“That man’s trouble. I’d be mighty careful around
him.” The deputy went to the window, zipping his jacket as he stood looking down the long, curving drive. After returning from the grave site earlier, he’d called for another policeman, his radio crackling. “If we can’t get prints, we can at least get pictures,” he said, explaining that Sergeant Sloan would be bringing a camera.

“Do you think Jasper had anything to do with what happened to Uncle Faris?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Who knows what Jasper might do?”

“But why?”

“To get even maybe. Or for just plain meanness. We’ll be having words with that one—as soon as we can chase him down.”

But mean and shiftless as he was, I couldn’t imagine Jasper Totherow exerting enough energy to dig up a grave—unless, of course, he was being paid for his efforts.

Behind us in the dining room I heard Augusta humming, and from the doorway I could see her, stretching on tiptoe to reach into far corners with a feather duster.

“Before your sergeant comes, would you mind looking around?” I asked. “I’d feel a lot safer knowing no one else is here.”

Hat in hand, he followed me into the dining room where Augusta stood with the light of the window behind her.

Deputy Weber took a couple of steps into the room, then stopped and inhaled deeply. “Ahh . . . somebody’s
been making strawberry jam . . . but isn’t that out of season?”

“Room deodorizer,” I explained. Augusta, sparkling beads swinging, did a little dance step as she quickly hid the duster behind her.

“I don’t see how anyone could be hiding down here,” the policeman said after completing his circuit of the first floor. “Why don’t you wait while I take a look upstairs?”

Augusta had decided the brass candlesticks on the hall console needed a vigorous rubbing. Her sunshiny locks, I noticed, were now confined in a flower-dotted kerchief. “Seems competent,” she said, buffing briskly, “but I doubt he’ll find anyone here.”

“He didn’t
see you.”
I sat on the bottom step and stared at her. She looked solid enough to me in her buttercup-yellow blouse and daisy-sprinkled headgear.

“Did you really think he would? Isn’t that why you wanted him to look around?”

“What did you expect?” I shrugged. “I had to know. Do you blame me?”

Augusta moved to the grandfather clock that hadn’t run in twenty years. “I’m not in the business of blame.” She opened the door of the clock and touched something inside. It whirred and struck eleven times. The correct hour. Naturally.

I looked up as the deputy started downstairs. “Everything seems okay up there,” he said. “I think I just heard Sergeant Sloan drive up; we’ll go out to the grave
site and get some photographs, and then I want to have a look around your barn.”

“What do you think you might find?”

“That grave looks like it was excavated by hand. Maybe they left behind some digging implements, like a shovel with fresh prints on it.”

I just hoped they hadn’t left behind Uncle Faris.

Even with Augusta there, it was quiet in the house after the two men left for the cemetery. Augusta wandered quietly from room to room, absorbing my history, I suppose, so she would be better equipped to do whatever it was she was supposed to do. And I hoped she would hurry and think of something because I didn’t know where to begin. Smokerise, the home that had nurtured me, offered no comfort. I knew why my mother had left, but I couldn’t help but feel abandoned. Friends who had flocked to comfort me when Maggie died had dropped out of sight one by one as if they were uncomfortable in my presence, and it was partly my fault, I know, for not being very receptive to them. Even my annoying cousin Beatrice (only she pronounced it Be-trice), who lived nearer than I’d like, had left me alone. I suppose I should be thankful for small favors.

The pendulum of the clock in the hall measured heavy minutes as I moved from the stiff-backed Victorian love seat in the living room to the mantel where my mother’s favorite figurines—a colonial couple—stood. The porcelain lady had a chipped elbow I had
broken playing ball in the house. Sepia photographs from a long-ago family reunion hung on the wall near where Mom’s piano used to be. I missed my mother, missed her music, her voice, yet a part of me resented her. It wasn’t a part I was proud of. My mother had deserted me for Savannah and a gig playing piano in classy restaurants.
To save her sanity
, my reasonable self chided. Yet hadn’t I given up a chance to live happily ever after just to stay behind and soothe her grief?

I picked up the porcelain gentleman. If I bashed his dainty arm against the wall, the two would be a matched pair. “Oh, the hell with it!” I set him down again.

“Does that really help?” Augusta sat in the rocking chair with Noodles on her lap.

I looked up and glared at her. “What?”

“The use of . . . well, unnecessary language.”

“You mean,
hell?
Damn right it does!” I dropped into the chintz-covered wingback chair and threw my legs over its rose-splashed arm.

“You can tell me about it if you like.” Augusta stroked Noodles’s pied back until I could have sworn that silly cat smiled.

“About what?”

“Whatever’s poisoning your heart.”

“You mean other than the fact that my sister and father lie buried out there in the graveyard, Mom’s now living in Savannah, and Uncle Faris has taken off for parts unknown?”

She didn’t miss a stroke. “Yes. Other than that. It has something to do with a man, doesn’t it?”

“My life doesn’t revolve around a man. Why would you say that?”

“Look in the mirror,” she said. “What do you see?”

I glanced at my reflection in the gilded oval behind her and made a face. “I see somebody who needs a haircut.” My hair, although light like my father’s and not a bad color, was long, thick, and curly, and if not controlled properly, took on a life of its own.

“I see someone young and attractive—although one’s physical attributes aren’t at all important in the overall scheme of things, mind you . . .” Augusta turned to sneak a glimpse at her own reflection and looked rather smug I thought. “It’s only natural you would be keeping company with someone you care about, someone you might hope to spend your life with.”

I didn’t answer. Again I saw Rob’s face, heard his voice.
Come to London with me, Prentice. It’s lonely over there without you. I want us to be together
.

I swallowed, looked away, but there was no way to hide my tears. “Rob McCullough,” I said. “His name is Rob McCullough.”

I had met him in Atlanta a couple of years before when he did a story on
Martha’s Journal
for the local newspaper. A few weeks later, he invited me to a party with some of his friends, and I think if he had proposed that very first night, I would have said, “Say when!” He was rangy and tall with a nose broken from high
school football, a chin he could use as a weapon, and brown hair, wiry as beach grass. His eyes were blue, blue, blue. I fell for him right away.

It must have been obvious. “Tread lightly,” a friend told me a few days later. “Rob’s wife Felicia died of leukemia a couple of years ago, and he’s still working through his grief.” And from observations I made from time to time, I wondered if he ever would. The two had been married only seven years when Felicia died.

But I could deal with that. I thought.

Augusta leaned forward slightly. “I’d like to hear about him,” she said over Noodles’s purring.

“Not much to tell,” I lied. “We saw each other for about two years, and I thought . . . well, I thought this was it. And then last summer he was offered a job with CNN’s London news bureau, and off he went. He called, of course, and we kept in touch on the Internet, but he never said anything about joining him there.”

“That must have been disheartening.” Augusta’s eyes clouded in sympathy.

“I was going to break it off with him, and then Dad died. Rob came back for the funeral, and he really was a help. I don’t know what Mom and I would’ve done without him.” I accepted a fresh hankie from Augusta. It smelled of sweet grass. “That’s when he asked me to go back with him.”

“I’m afraid I don’t see the problem.” Augusta spoke softly.

“Don’t you see? It was for the wrong reasons. He was lonely, he felt sorry for me. Besides, England’s a long
way away, and I couldn’t leave my mother just then. Dad’s death took us by surprise and she wasn’t up to handling it alone. And Maggie—well, we didn’t even know where Maggie was.”