Miss Dimple Disappears (17 page)

She didn’t have time to cry out at the sharp pain in the back of her head before darkness overtook her.

*   *   *

“They said it was a limb,” Charlie said the next morning at school. “You know how some of those magnolia branches hang over the pathway in the park, and they seem to think one could’ve broken off just as Geneva walked underneath.”

“Geneva doesn’t think so,” Lily Moss said, drawing her lips into a tight line. “From what I heard, she thought somebody was behind her. Must’ve come out from under that big old magnolia. Geneva had no business walking in that park by herself that time of night, especially after what happened to poor Dimple. It’s a good thing Sam came along when he did or who knows what might’ve happened.”

“She’s going to be all right, though, isn’t she?” Annie asked. “I mean she was still stunned but already sitting up by the time Sam found her.”

“But she’ll have one heck of a headache,” Charlie added. “Doc Morrison says she’s going to have a knot as big as a hen egg, but she’ll be okay.”

The three teachers had early-morning playground duty and news of Geneva’s injury of the night before was on everyone’s lips.

“I hope she hurries back … for more reasons than one,” Annie said with a groan as they noticed Alma Owens hurrying into the building.

“Oh, Lord! Hide the rhythm band instruments!” Charlie wailed.

“Well, I, for one, intend to find out just what Geneva heard last night,” Lily informed them. “With what’s been going on around here, I’m almost afraid to go anywhere in Elderberry anymore.”

And although Charlie was dying to talk with Geneva as well, she didn’t want to add fuel to Lily’s apprehension. Instead, she brought up the subject of the Thanksgiving party the town was planning for the servicemen due to pass through the next day.

“Mr. Faulkenberry’s letting us out early tomorrow so we can meet the train,” Charlie told them. “I’m going over after school today to help decorate.”

Already volunteers were busy cleaning and setting up tables in an empty store near the depot and many of the women had signed up to provide a Thanksgiving dinner for the young men, most of whom were probably homesick already. In the post office the week before, Charlie had noticed a large poster showing a family gathered around a dinner featuring a turkey that looked so real you could almost smell it. Lettering at the top read
OURS TO FIGHT FOR, FREEDOM FROM WANT
. If the servicemen passing through couldn’t make it home, at least they could give them the next best thing, she thought.

“Odessa’s already made cornbread for the dressing,” Annie said, and the whole house smells like onions. She won’t let anybody near the kitchen—even Miss Phoebe.”

Aunt Lou planned to take sweet potato soufflé and apple pie, and Charlie was going to make peanut butter cookies using brown sugar and corn syrup.

Her mother and aunt were already smoothing crisp white sheets over the long tables when Charlie arrived that afternoon, and she took her turn draping the walls with flags and buntings. “Wouldn’t it be festive if we could gather a lot of red, white, and blue balloons and hang them from the ceiling?” Aunt Lou said, but most of the rubber was being used in the war effort and Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a balloon.

Emmaline Brumlow busied herself decorating some of the tables with mounds of fruit and nuts, and Bessie Jenkins, in a bright blue flowered turban that matched her crisply starched housedress, arranged ears of dried corn, pumpkins, and winter squash on others. When Bessie wasn’t looking, Charlie saw Emmaline sneak along behind her and adjust what she’d done.

Working up her courage, she approached Emmaline and said she supposed Hugh had reached his destination in Virginia by now. The woman frowned as she silently studied the table, then picked up an acorn squash and put it back in the same place. “I wouldn’t know,” she said finally. “He hasn’t seen fit to telephone his mother. I don’t suppose
you’ve
heard anything?”

From the look she received, Charlie was frankly relieved that she hadn’t. “I really didn’t expect to,” she told her. “I doubt if he has access to a telephone.”

Annie, who had been listening, spoke with a grin. “You know how the song goes about not having private rooms or telephones,” she reminded her, referring to Irving Berlin’s popular hit, “This Is the Army, Mr. Jones.” Emmaline, apparently not amused, went back to sorting vegetables.

Elwin, accompanied by Velma Anderson, came in just then with arms full of brightly colored chrysanthemums Bob Robert had harvested from Phoebe’s backyard garden and Charlie welcomed the opportunity to help them round up vases.

“Have you had a chance to ask him?” Charlie whispered to Annie as they filled the vessels with water.

“Ask who?” Annie jumped back as she sloshed water on her skirt.

“
Elwin!
Remember? You promised to find out if he knew Henry Kilpatrick in college. Virginia said that Miss Dimple said—”

“I know! I know! I just haven’t had a chance. At dinner everybody was talking about what happened to Geneva and I haven’t been able to catch him alone.”

“I guess there’s no time like the present. I’ll ask him now.” Charlie set the vase aside and crossed the room to where Elwin was helping arrange a row of chairs to surround a space to dance.

Elwin nodded when he saw her. “Good, we can use your help. You can look through that stack of records somebody brought and pull out the best ones for dancing.”

Charlie found the records next to the old Victrola that had been shoved into the corner and began sorting through them, glad to have something to do with her hands.
How was she going to word this without sounding accusatory?

“You probably know Miss Dimple better than a lot of us,” she began, setting some of the records aside. “Did you ever have a chance to meet her brother?”

Elwin turned away to push a chair into line. “Why do you ask?”

“I just can’t understand why he hasn’t been more help in trying to find out what happened. I thought maybe if
you
talked with him—”

When he faced her Elwin Vickery’s answer was as rigid as his stance. “I went to the university with Henry Kilpatrick years ago, but I hardly knew him well. At any rate, I doubt if anything I might say would have the slightest influence.”

Charlie found herself staring at his back. “Well, so much for that,” she said to Annie, who had been eavesdropping under the pretense of helping sort the records.

Annie shivered. “Why do I feel like I’ve been doused with a bucket of well water?” she asked. “Somehow I get the notion Henry Kilpatrick isn’t Elwin’s favorite subject.”

Charlie shrugged. At the moment she didn’t have time to worry about it as Ray Richards and his wife, Ellie, arrived with boxes of dishes and flatware from their restaurant and wanted to know where to put them.

When they left the building a few hours later, what had earlier been a grimy abandoned store was converted into a festive and welcoming holiday room where their young guests could enjoy themselves and forget for a little while the destination that awaited them.

Annie paused to glance back as they left. “It really looks beautiful, doesn’t it? And I think we’ll have plenty of food. This is going to be fun, Charlie! I found some new Glenn Miller records in that stack so let’s hope we have some good dancers!”

Charlie was looking forward to it, too. Helping to entertain the troops would take her mind off the approaching holiday without Fain and Delia—for a little while, at least. She would see Hugh when he completed his medical training sometime after Christmas, and Delia had hinted that she would probably come home when and if her husband was shipped out, but they weren’t even sure where her brother was. Charlie knew only that this year Fain wouldn’t be able to eat his fill of Aunt Lou’s cornbread dressing and sweet potato pie, or if he’d have any kind of Thanksgiving dinner at all.

But she wasn’t going to think about that.

“Aunt Lou has ordered her Thanksgiving turkey from Mr. Cooper,” she told Annie, “so we’ll all be in for a treat, and she usually makes about five kinds of desserts, but with rationing, I guess we’ll be lucky to have one or two.” Last year their family had joined her aunt and uncle for Thanksgiving dinner that had included escalloped oysters along with the customary bird, but she knew better than to expect that this year.

“I hope she doesn’t mind the extra guests,” Annie said as they turned down Katherine Street for home. “You’ve seen how Joel can put the food away and I wouldn’t be surprised if Will couldn’t hold his own as well.”

“Aunt Lou should’ve had at least five children. She can’t wait! I know she plans to make a jam cake and Mama’s donating sugar for a lemon meringue pie. Does your Will have a favorite dessert?”

“Oh, you are a sneaky one!” Annie laughed. “If he’s like the rest of us he’ll be glad to get any dessert—and he’s
not my
Will!”

In her letter to Hugh that night, Charlie told him about helping his mother decorate the store for the troops they expected the next day, adding that she wished he could climb on a magic carpet and drop in among them at least long enough for a dance or two. There weren’t many opportunities to dance in Elderberry, Georgia, and the first, last, and only time she’d danced with Hugh had been at a fraternity party during his last year in college. She didn’t mention, of course, that Emmaline Brumlow was in a royal snit because he hadn’t telephoned.

After supper Charlie made peanut butter cookies for the next day’s party while her mother washed the dishes and put them away. “Have you noticed that Bessie has started wearing everything blue?” Jo asked as she hung up the dish towel. “She’s made scarves for several of the ladies at work, all from that same flowered pattern. Frankly, I’ve never cared much for blue, but I don’t guess it matters what color you wind around your head when you’re making ammunition.”

“Why blue?” Charlie asked as she slid the last of the cookies into the oven.

“Can’t you guess? It’s Ollie’s favorite color.” Her mother smiled. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if those two didn’t have an important announcement to make before long.”

“It’s about time. They’ve been going together for as long as I can remember,” Charlie said. “But what about old Mr. Kiker? Would Ollie bring Bessie to live with them out on that farm?”

“I don’t know. Now that he has a job over at the school, maybe they’ll find somebody else to help out there.” Jo sighed. “Poor old Paschall. His wife’s been gone twenty years if it’s a day. Shame he never married again.”

Jo was quiet as Charlie washed the mixing bowls in the dishpan and scalded them with boiling water. “Ben Morrison got downright short with me today, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why,” she said, sinking into a kitchen chair.

Charlie frowned. “Ben Morrison?
Doc
Morrison? When did you see him?”

“I have as much right to get my blood pressure checked as the next person,” her mother said with what could only be called an air of indignation.

“I never said you couldn’t, but I didn’t know you were having a problem. Why didn’t you tell me?” Charlie became suddenly concerned. “Have you been feeling dizzy lately, light-headed?”

Her mother waved her away. “Of course not, but I had the morning free since I didn’t have to go into Milledgeville today, and I wanted to ask him some questions.”

Uh-oh, Charlie thought. “What kind of questions?”

“About Wilson Malone.” Jo drew herself up and folded her arms in front of her. “We’ve never had any kind of rational explanation about what happened to him, and then the very next day Dimple Kilpatrick just up and vanishes from the face of the earth. Can you tell me that’s not strange?”

“Of course it’s strange.” Charlie admitted that she felt the same way. But what did that have to do with Doc Morrison, she wanted to know.

Her mother took the broom from the pantry and began to sweep the floor with brisk, angry strokes. “All I know is that when I asked him what killed Wilson he as much as told me to mind my own business.”

That night Charlie Carr dreamed her sister Delia had enlisted in the navy and put her newborn on the train for home. When Charlie went to the depot to greet the baby, a tiny infant wearing a blue flowered turban stepped off holding a huge turkey drumstick in one hand and an American flag in the other.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Nine days. She had been here nine days. Dimple Kilpatrick had read four mystery novels, a copy of
The Farmer’s Bulletin
(circa 1924), in which she learned about the early mechanics of home canning; stitched together quilting squares until she dreamed in red, white, and blue; started a journal on the yellowed paper she’d found lining a dresser drawer; and learned to be an adequate liar. In fact, Miss Dimple thought, her performance of the day before would have been worthy of a standing ovation had she been onstage.

Mr. Smith had come downstairs with her usual midday meal of canned soup, stale soda crackers, and a banana that had seen better days. Lying fully clothed on top of the bedclothes, Miss Dimple lifted her head weakly from the pillow and asked him to take it away.

“What’s the matter with you?” he said, setting the tray on the table. “There’s nothing wrong with this food. You have to eat, you know.”

“No, I most certainly do not. The very smell of it makes me ill. Please take it out of my sight.” She uttered the last sentence in a rasping voice that grew weaker with each word and let her head fall back on the pillow. Earlier, Miss Dimple had made a thick lather with the Ivory Soap in her bathroom and let it dry on her face, then wiped it away leaving a powdery dusting. She coughed daintily and closed her eyes.

“Well, look, what is it you
do
eat? You’re not sick, are you?”

She turned her face away as she heard his footsteps approaching, creeping cautiously as if he were afraid she might be contagious. “You have to eat,” he said again. “You’ll be sick if you don’t … you could starve.”