Read Angel at Troublesome Creek Online

Authors: Mignon F. Ballard

Angel at Troublesome Creek (23 page)

BOOK: Angel at Troublesome Creek
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“But when I’d ask her about the Bible after that, she’d put me off, said she didn’t know where it was.” When Fronie Temple smiled she reminded me of a dog baring its teeth. She smiled now. “She knew very well where it was.
“She and that Delia—always thought they were so high muck-ety-muck them and their I’ll Try Society! Well, she’s not so special now!”
Aunt Caroline had taught me we weren’t supposed to hate, but I hated Fronie Temple. Hated her greed and her vanity and her selfishness—traits common to most of us to a certain degree, but Fronie Temple was just slapdab evil. “You didn’t have to kill her,” I said.
“Oh, but I did. I had to stop her, didn’t I, before you saw where you belonged on the family tree? It should’ve stopped right there. You never would’ve known. The old man would die, I would inherit, and that would be that.” Fronie stroked the grip of her revolver. “I really did care for your Aunt Caroline in spite of her being such a snob. She was good to help with my music, and don’t think I’m not grateful. Why, it was me who got the music committee to commission Caroline’s portrait.”
“Kent Coffey. And he was to look for the Bible while he painted, I suppose?” I added a rock to my pile of debris, but it was too small to do any good.
“Certainly not! Why, that was before I even knew Fain’s uncle Ben was still alive.” She seemed genuinely insulted. “Kent came to me as a tenant—such a good-looking young man, don’t you think? But he was always short of money, and I’d seen some of his work, so I recommended him for the job. As far as I know, the portrait turned out just fine, although God knows what he did with it.”
This woman either didn’t know the difference between right and wrong, or she just didn’t give a damn. I knew now Fronie had written the note “from Delia” I’d found on my door, and I’m sure she never called the barbecue place at all. It must have been Fronie watching from across the street when I left Delia’s that night we found the key in the cookie jar. I wondered if she’d left a tape of herself singing so I’d think she never left home.
Through the trees I could see cars passing on the road behind her, but no one would think to look for me here. By now Delia and Sam would know something was wrong, but they’d never suspect Fronie Temple. My knees ached from squatting and I scratched a couple of ant bites on my leg. My mouth felt as dry as the dust in my pocket and sweat trickled slowly down my cheek, oozed between my breasts. I thought of the cool creek at Summerwood, rain splashing on sidewalks, a tall glass of ice water.
Fronie sipped from a Thermos of iced tea she’d taken from her hamper and glanced at her watch. “Keep looking, Mary George. We have plenty of daylight yet.” She pointed to a patch of weeds behind me. “Why haven’t you looked over there?”
I hadn’t looked over there because that was where I threw the keys—or at least I thought it was. But the gun was persuasive, so I obliged, adding a little more dirt to my supply. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the bulging pocket. Fronie had resumed her seat under the tree and I looked up to find her staring at me with an expression that made me almost as nervous as the gun. She rattled the ice in her cup and drained the contents.
“And how did you find Kent?” she asked.
“What do you mean, how did I find him?”
Fronie showed her teeth again. “I think you know what I mean.”
Gold gleamed from the crowns in her mouth. “I found him rather attractive,” she said. “And I’m sure he felt the same way about me.” She giggled girlishly. “A woman can sense these things.”
“He set that fire, didn’t he?” I wanted to throw up.
“Actually I did that,” Fronie admitted. “Kent had some rather peculiar standards, but he did keep an eye on you for me. Actually, I think he rather enjoyed it, Mary George. You bewitched him, I’m afraid. Got to where I just couldn’t trust him. Pity. The two of us would have been good for each other. Why, he might’ve lived rent free.”
I thought of the radio announcement about the white Honda going off the side of the mountain and it made me sick. I don’t know how she managed it, but I knew Fronie Temple was responsible, just as I knew she had used that woman’s car to run down Bonita Moody. And poor Bonita hadn’t the least idea who Fronie was.
And now it was my time.
“You’ve fooled around long enough!” Fronie Temple threw down her cup and stalked in circles about me. “I can see I’ll have to look for those keys myself. You can either help me find them or stand there until I do. I’m going to have to kill you anyway—it really doesn’t matter when. Nobody’s going to hear. Nobody’s going to see.”
I stood slowly, my heart melting into the red soil at my feet. I was so scared my teeth locked together. I couldn’t yell if I wanted to. Was I really going to die? Had Augusta Goodnight saved me for this?
I remembered the angel sitting on Aunt Caroline’s stairs in her little green suit and her frilly dot of a hat. How she’d jolted me back to reality with the sound of her no-nonsense voice. “I’ve had about enough of that,” she’d said.
And so had I. This woman had a weapon, but I had one too. Little David used a stone to topple the giant. I would sting Fronie Temple where it hurt the most, and her weakness would bring her down.
 
M
y back ached. I stretched. And oh, it felt so good!
“Why are you smiling? What are you doing?” Fronie stepped away from me. “Be still! You stay right there.”
This woman was stupid. Rotten and mean and stupid. This was going to be fun. I let go with the first of my ammunition. “It’s too late, Fronie,” I said. “A lot of people know about that Bible now. If anything happens to me, it won’t do you any good, you won’t even be able to inherit. Don’t you think they might figure out who would benefit by my death?
“You know, I just don’t believe you’ve been thinking. You are capable of thinking, aren’t you?”
“What?” She lowered the gun, just a little.
“You brought poppyseed muffins to Aunt Caroline the day you made her fall, so she had to let you in. You brought them on that pink-flowered plate, and when I ate one, it was stale. It was stale because they’d been there since
before
she died. But you didn’t think about that.”
“I really can’t see that it matters.” She held the gun stiffly in front of her. “Don’t you get any closer now.”
Keeping an eye on her, I inched slowly backward. I knew my aunt, and no matter how suspicious she was of Fronie Temple, Aunt Caroline would have accepted the muffins graciously. Courtesy was ingrained in her, but it betrayed her in the end.
“You followed her into the kitchen with them, all the time pretending to be her friend,” I said. “But she knew something was wrong. I guess she just didn’t realize how far you’d go.”
“How do you know? You’d never be able to prove it!” Fronie took a step closer. “Not that you’ll be around that long.”
The two of them must have spent some time in the kitchen in order for Aunt Caroline to quickly circle Fronie’s recipe in
Troublesome Creek Cooks
. The cookbook stayed in constant use, and was probably already open on her counter.
“In that case, you might as well tell me,” I said. “You forced her into the attic, didn’t you? But the Bible wasn’t there.”
Fronie Temple didn’t answer, but her expression told me I was right. My heart, filled with fury and pain, wanted me to throw myself on her then and there, beat her into the ground. But my head told me to wait. Fronie had a gun. I didn’t. Emotions would have to take a backseat. For now.
Somehow, while in the attic, Aunt Caroline had managed to slip the key to the post office box into the cookie jar. I think she had intended to mail it to me, probably that very day, and either had it in her pocket, or distracted Fronie long enough to put it there while they were in the kitchen. I didn’t want to know how she died—whether she fell or was pushed, but I suspected the latter.
“What’s done is done,” Fronie Temple said. “Words aren’t going to change it. You’re just talking to hear yourself talk, but it’s not going to work. I’m not listening to a word you’re saying.”
Okay, Mary George,
I thought,
time for phase two. “I’m saying
I don’t think you’re very bright. Except for the clothes you wear—they’re a little too bright, don’t you think? Tacky, in fact. Tight too. You’re not a size ten anymore, are you? And you’re certainly no beauty queen. Poor Kent! No wonder he was in a hurry to get away. Get real! Do you really think he cared anything about you?” My smile grew broader. Each barb went in a little deeper. Each flinch brought me pleasure. I hoped my sweet aunt Caroline, wherever she was, would forgive me. And somehow, I knew she would.
Fronie’s lip trembled. “You shut up! I’ll be glad to be rid of the both of you—you and that big, ugly dog. I wish he’d run in front of a truck when I ran him off before.”
“That was you following me, wasn’t it? The day I went to Hughes, to Summerwood. You were driving that woman’s car.”
“Oh, that. I thought you were on the way to your uncle’s in Hunters’ Oak. Had to find some way to stop you.” She shrugged. “Well, you got by me that time.”
“What were you going to do, run me off the road?” As soon as I said it, I knew it was true. I remembered an unusually narrow and dangerous stretch between Hughes and High Point. Thank goodness we had been able to give her the slip. “It really didn’t take a lot to outwit you, Fronie,” I said softly.
She looked like she’d been slapped. “Why are you saying these things to me?”
My hand closed around the dirt in my pocket, I moved a step closer. “Because they’re true. And that’s not all. You’d think you could at least follow a recipe, but your cooking stinks too. Isn’t fit to eat. Remember those squash ‘wads’ on the Fourth of July? Kent and I buried them in the park—without honors.”
Ohmygosh! She lifted the gun, but her hand trembled, and her face was about the same color as her lipstick. Fronie Temple had probably shoved Aunt Caroline down the stairs, run down Bonita Moody in the dark of night, and no telling what she’d done to Kent Coffey, but having to shoot somebody face to face was playing on her nerves. A tremor went through her.
“Actually, I think your singing’s the worst,” I said. “A joke. Everybody’s laughing. Half the congregation wears earplugs.” I was getting high on this. Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier?
“Stop! That’s not true!” When Fronie Temple screamed, I let fly a fistful of dirt as close to her eyes as I could get and dived for her knees.
The gun flew somewhere in the bushes, and Fronie doubled over like a big bag of laundry and landed on her hands and knees in the dirt. “You can’t talk to me like that! I’ll show you!” Crying, she started crawling toward a tangle of honeysuckle on the fallen log and I saw the ugly gleam of metal beneath the leaves.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I sprang over her back like a child playing leapfrog and stomped hard on her outstretched fingers just as she reached for the gun.
This time I think Fronie Temple actually hit high F—and she’d been trying for years, but she didn’t seem pleased about it. When the screaming and jumping around subsided, she saw that I held the gun, and I’ll swear if her attitude didn’t do a complete turnaround.
“I don’t know what came over me, Mary George,” she said with a sickly little smile. “It must be my medication. Heart palpitations, don’t you know? Nerves, the doctor says. Pure stress. I just can’t imagine what made me do that.”
“Ask me if I care,” I said, and got a firmer grip on the revolver. I can’t stand guns, don’t even like to touch them, but I couldn’t take a chance on this crazy woman getting her hands on it again. But what was I going to do with her? And where on earth were the keys to my car?
Then a gleam caught my eye, and there they were in plain sight just a few feet away in a spot where I was sure I’d looked earlier. And when I picked them up, I knew Augusta was there. Well, it was about time.
“Fronie, old girl,” I said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here for a while. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable under that nice tree, and I imagine somebody will be along to see to you in a little while.” I squinted at the sun. “As you said, there’s plenty of daylight left.”
“Where are you going? What are you going to do? You’re not going to leave me here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Oh, but I am. Can’t very well drive and keep an eye on you, can I? I wouldn’t touch that door handle, Fronie. That’s right, get away from the car—way away. Somebody should be here shortly.”
“But I won’t try anything … really. You don’t have to worry about me … . I wouldn’t hurt you, Mary George. I wouldn’t hurt anybody … .”
I could still hear her pleading as I backed the car to turn around. I hoped she would be there by the time the police came.
 
 
“Quick thinking, Mary George Murphy! I’d say you handled that situation very well.” Suddenly Augusta was beside me beaming.
“And no thanks to you. Those car keys were right under her nose. If Fronie had seen them, I’d have been a goner.”
“Ah, but she wasn’t going to see them,” my angel said.
“Damn it, Augusta, how do you know? You weren’t even there.”
Augusta ran her fingers through her long, gingery hair and let it flow behind her. “Oh, I do wish you’d watch your language. Not only was I there,” she said, “but I was standing on them.”
 
 
“Well, well,” Uncle Ben said, “I’ve always wanted to identify myself with that droll adventurer, Mark Twain, and I’m delighted to see we actually have something in common.”
“And how is that?” Sam asked.
“The reports of my death—impending death, in my case—are greatly exaggerated.”
My face turned hot, and if the table hadn’t had a glass top, I might have crawled under it, but my uncle’s uncluttered sunroom offered no such place to hide.
Our dinner together had been postponed after my unfortunate confrontation with phony Fronie, and now, a couple of weeks later, Delia, Sam, and I were guests for a nutritious meal of pasta, and vegetables, fruit, and a delicious whole grain bread served warm with honey.
Uncle Ben himself, refreshed after a short nap following his daily three-mile swim, looked firm, fit, and not much over fifty—although he admitted to seventy, and was probably closer to eighty.
He seemed a happy man sitting there in his comfortable high-backed wicker chair with a cross-eyed Siamese in his lap and a brandy in his hand. “I’ve enjoyed good health, good friends, and a good, long life,” he told us, stroking the cat’s cream-and-brown back. “But now I’m getting my affairs in order.”
And from the looks exchanged between my uncle and his attractive, middle-aged secretary, Ava, that wasn’t all he was getting, I thought. No doubt about it, Uncle Ben was a happy man.
And a shrewd one. He had seen through Fronie Temple at once. “A coarse, yeller-haired baggage! That’s what she was when poor, gullible Fain married her, and that’s what she is today. Why, the silly woman actually tried to flirt with me. I can’t imagine why she’d think I’d leave her one cent.” My uncle pondered his brandy. “No class. Absolutely no class at all.”
“No conscience either, apparently,” Delia said. “They found sleeping pills dissolved in the Thermos of coffee in that fellow’s car—the one who went off the mountain. He must’ve fallen asleep.”
Kent Coffey had suffered severe injuries and it would be a good long time before he’d be able to live normally. Fortunately he had managed to crawl away from the wreckage before his car fell to the bottom of the deep ravine.
In a way, I guess Kent was lucky. And so was I. Not only had Sam and I found each other, but Delia was going to take over the business end of Camp Summerwood, and with Cindy coming back as cook, we had a good start on our staff.
I say “our staff” even though I’m not on it, not officially anyway, unless you count weekend volunteers. But I start back to school part-time this fall, and if all goes well, I should be able to get my degree in a couple of years. And Uncle Ben—bless his big old fat checkbook—insists on paying my tuition, although I doubt I’ll inherit a cent. After all, it looks like he’s planning to hang on awhile longer, at least I hope he will. But Sam and I have persuaded him to set up an endowment for the camp. The new main hall will be named for him, of course, and with continued support and a challenging faculty, such as Sam (and eventually me), Summerwood should soon be back on its feet.
Now the ceiling fan whirred as I sipped ice water with a wedge of lime. All afternoon I had kept an eye out for “Igor,” listened for the heavy shuffle of his feet, but he had yet to put in an appearance. Maybe it was his day off.
My great-uncle Ben set aside his snifter, folded his hands, and looked at me. “If your friend Delia hadn’t called to see if I’d heard from you when everything came to a boil the other day, I wouldn’t have known what was going on.”
Sam laughed. “Then I guess you didn’t catch the five o’clock news. Delia and I were out scouting the countryside for Mary G. when they announced over the radio about Fronie and the tomato truck.”
The image was so comical it made me forget my brief efforts to be dignified, and I giggled, picturing my former landlady rolling around in a load of produce.
It seems the driver of the truck had stopped to relieve himself near the spot where I left Fronie and she took the opportunity to hitch a ride in back while he wasn’t looking.
Fortunately, the police caught up with them a few miles down the road, but not before the troopers’ car got “bombed” with exploding red fruit.
“I knew something was wrong,” Sam told him, “when Mary G. didn’t show up for barbecue. She might stand me up, but she’d never turn down a good batch of Brunswick stew, so I gave Delia a call and she was just about frantic.”
“Fronie had phoned earlier pretending to be someone calling from the vet’s,” Delia said. “Told me Mary George asked her to say she’d be leaving an hour later than we planned. Of course when I went to meet her she was already gone, and Doc Nichols said nobody had called from there.”
BOOK: Angel at Troublesome Creek
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