Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man? (29 page)

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Authors: Patricia Sprinkle

BOOK: Thoroughly 03 - Who Invited the Dead Man?
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Meriwether gasped. She pressed one hand over her mouth and spoke around it. “Yeah.”
“You probably tore something. You need to go straight to the emergency room to get it checked.” Martha held out her hand for Myrtle to help her up.
Simultaneously, Slade asked, “You think it’s that bad?” and Jed said, “Do we need an ambulance?”
Slade glared at him, then looked up at Martha. “Do we need an ambulance?”
“What do you think?” Martha bent to ask Meriwether.
Small beads of sweat were forming on her upper lip, and her eyes looked like she was in a lot of pain. Slade bent nearer. “We can get there faster if you can hop to the car.”
She pressed her lips tight together, but nodded.
I saw Jed pick up his fork and jab it several times into his pie, but he didn’t say a word.
Myrtle hurried to the kitchen. “I’ll call to tell them you’re coming.”
Slade awkwardly helped Meriwether to her feet.
“Carry her!” Jed urged before he could help it.
Slade swept him a scathing glance. Meriwether bit her lip. “I think I can walk if you’ll help me. It’s just a little sprain.” She put one arm around his neck and he held one hand at her waist. She hopped toward his sleek green Lexus in the parking lot, wincing with every hop.
“Turkey,” Jed muttered, watching them drive away. “He should have carried her. Or at least brought the car to the door.” Finally, he remembered Alice. “Now, where were we?”
Alice gathered up her purse. “I think I need to get back. Mrs. Wainwright would kill me if she heard about Meriwether from anybody else. But you stay and finish your pie. I’ll walk—it’s not far.” All the light was gone from her face, and her eyes were stormy. I saw she had pulled back her hair again, too, and secured it with a brown scrunchy.
“Want to join us?” I called to Jed when the door closed behind her.
He gathered up his pie and coffee. “Might as well. All the other beautiful women in the place have deserted me.”
“Looked to me like you were losing the salad wars, too,” I told him, signaling Myrtle to heat up my coffee.
Jed grinned and brushed his throat. “Yeah.” He puckered his forehead. His eyes strayed to the door. “You think Alice was upset because I tried to help Meriwether?”
Martha and I didn’t say a word.
He sat tapping his fingers on the table, a habit he’d always had when he was little. For a while he’d worked it out by drumming in the school band, but it looked like he had a lot of pent-up drumming to get out of his system that night.
“You finding out any more about Hiram?” I asked, to make conversation. I was pretty sure Buster Gibbons would have told me anything he’d told Jed.
Jed shook his head, and his lips twisted in a rueful smile. “Poor old Hiram. I wish he’d stayed in Atlanta. He was doing real well. Working regular, too, doing yard work and a little maintenance for a small apartment complex. He had a room on a bus line, and I could keep an eye on him. We’d have dinner from time to time, so I could make sure he was all right.”
Martha forked up the last of her pie crust. “Then why’d he come back?”
“Same old thing. He thought aliens were operating in those apartments. He found a stray pup wandering around and started feeding it, but one day the pup disappeared. Probably just moved on. But Hiram went all over the area looking for it. Even had me print signs to put on telephone poles. When he couldn’t find it, he swore aliens had taken it.”
His drumming was driving me crazy, so I put my hand over his. “Sorry,” he apologized, wrapping his hands around his cup.
“You mean Hiram came home because he lost a dog?” Martha asked.
Jed’s blue eyes gleamed with mischief. “Oh, that wasn’t all. If it had just been the dog, I don’t think he’d have given up his job. He really liked the work, felt important. The tenants counted on him to keep things running, and it was like he had finally found his niche. But a few weeks after the dog disappeared, one of the tenants died, and the family came to get the stuff at night after Hiram went home. When the furniture rental company arrived the next day, Hiram was sure the tenant had been beamed up to a spaceship. He explained to me that aliens put humans in big zoos on Venus. The last straw was when a car got stolen from the parking lot in the middle of the day, in the twenty minutes it took Hiram to walk down to the Seven-Eleven for some lunch. He passed it going out and it wasn’t there when he came back. At first he thought the guy who owned it had gone out for something—he worked nights. But in a little while the guy came out to get in the car, and they realized it had been taken. The police didn’t find it, either—which isn’t surprising. It had probably been chopped for parts before the police started looking. But Hiram was sure aliens had stolen it. He said they had a dog, a woman, and a car, so all they needed was a man to complete the exhibit. He was terrified he’d be next. In fact, he wanted me to come back home, too. Said aliens were less likely to invade a little place like Hopemore.”
“And then they did.” I didn’t know if I felt like laughing or crying. Poor Hiram, was there anything any of us could have done to make him feel safer on God’s green earth?
“So he said.” I saw in Jed’s eyes some of what I was feeling. “He was convinced that night when he called me that at least one alien was walking around the streets of Hopemore wearing somebody else’s skin. What they did with the skinless person, he wasn’t real clear on.”
“Stop it,” I told him, reaching for my pocketbook. “If I start picturing skinless humans wandering around the ether in a spaceship, I’m gonna wind up as crazy as Hiram.”
Jed got suddenly solemn. “I just hope nobody winds up that dead.”
25
Tuesday I went over to the bank for change. As I came out the door, Gusta’s black Cadillac pulled into the handicapped zone. Otis drove, Gusta rode beside him, and Meriwether sat sideways in the back. “Where’s Alice?” I asked as Otis hurried to open the door, leaving the keys in the car.
Gusta climbed out with a puff of disgust. “That aunt in Jacksonville is poorly again. She left early and won’t be back until late.” You’d have thought Alice had gone to Syria for a month.
“She does deserve a little time off,” I reminded my old friend and foe.
“She worked pretty hard yesterday,” she admitted, patting her purse. “She’s typed all my tenants’ names into the computer so we can enter their checks tomorrow. But she gallivanted all over town last weekend. Out with that therapist with the odd hair Saturday until all hours, then out with a girlfriend Sunday night.”
Meriwether’s eyes met mine. Her mouth twitched and I had to look away not to grin. Alice was pretty savvy if she’d already learned not to mention Jed Blaine to Gusta.
Meriwether looked especially pretty that morning, but I didn’t mention it. It might be pain that made her eyes bright and her cheeks pink.
Gusta was still ranting. “. . . don’t know what I pay her for. Back when Granddaddy was governor—”
“Forty hours a week,” I said.
That turned off her water. “What?”
“You pay her for forty hours a week. Any more and she deserves overtime.”
“Nonsense. She gets room and board, and the work is practically nonexistent. But I can’t stand here talking, I need to make this deposit and get Meriwether to the doctor. Claims she’s torn muscles in her leg.”
As Gusta stomped into the bank, I bent down to see how Meriwether was doing. She had her injured leg up on the seat. “It’s hurting a lot,” she admitted. “They immobilized it Sunday night and said to wait for the swelling to go down. Now I’ve got to see an orthopedist. Heaven knows what he’ll do to it. I called Otis to see if he could drive me, and found he was already scheduled to bring Nana to the bank. She insists on coming with me.”
“It’s her place to do that,” Otis reminded her.
“I can see why Gusta thought it was a bad time for Alice to go away, though,” I said.
“Don’t let Nana’s grumbling fool you. She brags all the time about Alice to me.”
“Letting you know you can be replaced.”
“Absolutely.” Meriwether’s eyes twinkled. “And Alice has done marvelous things. She’s persuaded Nana to put all her databases onto the computer. That’s practically every organization in town, you know. And they started inputting her financial accounts yesterday. Alice even convinced Nana she ought to put me on her bank account, so I can sign checks in case anything happens to her. Daddy and I tried for years to get her to have him on the accounts, but Nana always hemmed and hawed and accused us of expecting her to get mentally incompetent.”
“How did Alice convince her, then?”
“She told her Bitsy broke her hand once, and if her son hadn’t been on the account, she wouldn’t have had a way to sign checks. Nana’s arthritis is already so bad she can scarcely hold a pen, so she finally saw the sense of it. She’s getting a signature card for me this morning.”
“Very wise.” As I stood up to head back to the office, Otis spoke from the front seat.
“I wish Miss Winifred would put you on her account, too. It plumb worries us, Judge. We never know from one day to the next whether she’s gonna be thinking clearly enough to sign her name.” Appalled, I remembered I’d promised to call Pooh’s lawyer, but it kept slipping my mind. But Otis and Lottie would be up a creek without a paddle if Pooh couldn’t sign checks. They couldn’t buy groceries or get their own paychecks, and Pooh’s fears that her lights and water could be cut off might come true. He asked anxiously, “Could you talk to her about that?”
“I’ll call her lawyer this morning,” I promised. “Joe Riddley and I ought to put one of our boys on our account, too. He’s not always reliable right now, and I could break a hand as easily as Gusta. Listen, Meriwether, do you need anything? Meals brought in, or somebody to stay with you at night? I’m sure Ridd’s Bethany would be glad to move in with you for a few days.”
“I’m fine, but thanks.”
Seeing Gusta heading out the bank door, I said loud enough for her to hear me, “Still, that child does deserve some time off. Gusta can’t expect her to work twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.”
Gusta, making tracks for her car pretty fast for a woman on a cane, ignored me.
Vern, irate, hobbled three steps behind. He must have missed her arrival and was making up for lost time. As Gusta lowered herself into her seat, he bent down with a very red face and shook a finger at her. “I’m gonna have the judge here put you in jail for a hundred years.”
She slammed the door and spoke through her lowered window. “I can’t talk to you now. We’re late for the doctor.”
“You get him to give you a handicapped sticker.”
“Age is its own handicap,” she called as they rolled away.
 
Gusta wasn’t the only person disgruntled with Alice. I got home after work that evening to find Darren helping Joe Riddley down the driveway on the walker. They were halfway to the road when I got there, and Darren looked as blue as his hair.
“Who ate your brownie?” I greeted him. “You were smiling big enough on Saturday, racing Miss Alice around the courthouse. You’d even gotten her to let down her hair.”
“That was before that lawyer cut me out. I can’t compete with BMW convertibles.”
“I doubt you’ll have to. Jed’s old girlfriend fell right next to their table at Myrtle’s, and he was on his knees helping her in a flash. Miss Alice was
not
impressed. Walked home, in fact.”
That, finally, got a grin. “Great! I’ll give her a call. And do you think I could have a few days off around Thanksgiving to go home? I want to ask Alice to come, too. She likes Florida.”
“You can have time off as far as I’m concerned, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to ask Alice. She’s down in Jacksonville visiting her aunt again today.”
“I hope she’s okay. She seems to be pretty sickly.”
“Since she’s Alice’s only relative, I expect Alice worries more than she would if she had a slew of aunts and cousins.”
“You all planning on talking all day?” Joe Riddley demanded loudly. “I need to get down to the field to check Ridd’s corn.”
“Sic ’em!” Joe urged from the top of his cap.
“The corn is finished,” I informed him. “It’s November. Why don’t you and Darren head back up the drive and I’ll fix us some hot chocolate?” The breeze was brisk.
“Why don’t you try a few steps without the walker?” Darren added. “Let Mac bring it, and I’ll walk right beside you to spot you. You aren’t going to fall.”
“I fall easier than you know. Fell down the steps at church Sunday and it took four men to get me up.”
As I shook my head to tell Darren that was another of Joe Riddley’s tall tales, he told a taller one. “And last week I was helping Ridd pitch hay from our barn loft, and I fell all the way from the barn. Good thing I landed on the hay, or I coulda got hurt bad.”
“And next week we’re going to the Empire State Building and you can fall off there,” I told him. “Let me take the walker, hon. Try taking a few steps without it.”

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