Chapter Thirteen

When I reached the backyard there was no one to be seen. As I rounded the corner toward the front of the house I saw something gleaming under the shrubs. Sherman pawed it. He was always chasing lizards. “Stop it,” I yelled at him. “Bad, Sherman, bad.” I picked up the cat, but the black-green shiny object didn’t scoot away. “Run for your life, lizard,” I said while Sherman squirmed mightily under my arm. I touched the lizard with my foot and still it didn’t move. I sent Sherman around the corner and bent to pick it up. Not a lizard at all, but part of an old earring, blackened silver with a slender green stone. The earring felt heavy in my hand and looked very expensive, maybe even real? I tried to polish it against my shirt but couldn’t tell any difference. Though it was too heavy to be plastic, the earring still looked like something Crazy Reba would hang on herself. A real bauble. I patted Sherman, who now rolled over on his back and waited to get his stomach rubbed. “You’re innocent. And I’m sorry I ever thought you weren’t. Go sun yourself. Go in peace.” I could swear the cat smiled. “Sweet idiot.”

I held the earring up to the sun as Scott came up from his errand. “You sun gazing?”

“Look at this.” I handed him the broken earring.

“Where’d it come from?” He studied the back of it.

“Sherman had it.”

“Sherman?”

“He must have found it in the grass. I thought he had a lizard and took it away. Think it’s real?”

“It looks really real to me,” Scott said.

“Looks like Crazy Reba to me, but where would she get it?”

“Who knows? The latest yard sale? Flea market? The dump? She forages twenty-four hours a day … wide and deep … all hours of every night, days and weekends.”

“I wonder what all she sees?” Scott asked. “What she knows? Maybe she knows who killed Miss Lavinia. Father Roderick? But who’d believe her if she did?”

I remembered Reba the day I’d bought her fried chicken, singing, “Jesus give me this necklace.” What had all that been about? Was this earring part of it? Maybe Reba had a key to some of this stuff going on … if it wasn’t Reba herself. But I couldn’t imagine Reba poisoning Miss Lavinia. Father Roderick? I didn’t know. Reba had such strong hands and her mind was so strange.

A blue sedan cruised by, turned when it passed Verna’s and came back. This time it pulled in the drive and a woman in white slacks opened the car door and yelled behind her cupped hand, “You got any rooms left?”

“Yes.” I motioned her in. “We’ve got parking in the back.”

The woman hopped out, pulling on a black sweatshirt that read on the chest: “God, I’m good.” “We’re half-lost,” she said. “And I told Leon if he went a mile further, I’d faint on him. I’m that fatigued. There’s tomorrow, I said, but Leon could drive straight into it. Some men think they’ve got to drive the wheels off a car the first day.” She flung a huge straw purse over her shoulder and pulled on pink plastic sandals. “Shirley Putterman,” she said. “And I’m pleased to be here. I could kiss this ground I’m so tired of that car.”

I led her toward the hall registration desk. The woman hollered around the porch as Leon drove in the back. “Bring that little bag, too,” she called. “I need…”

I didn’t hear the last part. “Room with a private bath or shared?” I asked. “We have no other guests at the moment, so the shared bath would be private unless someone else comes.”

“We’ll take a chance,” the woman said, and signed the registration. “Life’s a chance anyway, I’ve always said, and I’ll even shower with somebody if I have to. Naked is a state of mind. That’s how God made us and I’ve never been ashamed of it.” She looked around the room. “Honey, this is the cutest house. Can I poke around a little?”

“If you don’t mind stepping around paint cans, ladders and stacks of lumber. You’ll have to use your imagination. All four bedrooms upstairs have been redone; everything else is in the process.”

Shirley Putterman stood in the dining room. “That corner cupboard must be two hundred years old. Honey, where on earth did you get a piece like that?”

“My grandfather,” I said. “He made it. Also the bed in your room, chest … the nicer pieces of furniture.”

“This table must hold sixteen. It’s solid, I bet.”

“We don’t serve meals,” I said. “Only breakfast … until ten.” I suddenly thought of Miss Lavinia, who never made it down to breakfast at all.

“We had barbecue. When Leon gets barbecue hungry and there’s a place within fifty miles he can spot it. He eats.” Shirley met him at the front door and patted his tummy. “That’s my Pooh Bear,” she said. “Upstairs.”

“To the left,” I said. “The green room.”

“I just love it,” Shirley said from the stairs. “Love it.”

It felt good to have guests again. The Dixie Dew was still in business. I felt like flying a victory flag to celebrate. Don’t tread on us, I wanted to say. Maybe I ought to make a flag with the slogan or some motif and fly it out front. Or different ones for every day in the week.

After Scott left and the Puttermans got settled for the night, I made myself a sandwich and a cup of tea, which I took to the front porch, then sat in the swing and took deep breaths of good, clean Littleboro air. I loved the smell of boxwoods and sometimes there was a lingering waft of Verna’s lilacs.

Later that night I was reading in bed long after the house had gotten totally quiet. There was a breeze through the open windows and the sheer curtains billowed softly. A touch of dampness to the night air made it a little too cool for me. When I got up to lower the window I saw someone standing on the corner under the streetlight. Reba? Or the ever present Ossie DelGardo? The bulky shadow moved out of the light before I could tell if the figure looked male or female. But why was someone standing there at all? Were they watching the house or my bedroom? Either one didn’t make me feel very comfortable. I checked the locks on the doors. I listened to crickets and tree frogs and watched a luna moth batting the streetlight. Everything seemed normal. At peace in Littleboro. Or was something just watching and waiting with me in mind?

The next morning at the drawing board in my bedroom I steadied my hand and cut a pineapple stencil with an X-ACTO knife. I was surprised my hand didn’t shake. Easy, I told myself. Slow and steady and easy. I bent over Mama Alice’s old breadboard where I’d tacked the pattern with the stencil over it.

The day before, Scott had painted the sunporch linoleum jade green with dried swirls of dark green over it like shadows fringing the sun through spring leaves. It turned out better than I thought it would.

I planned pink pineapple designs in the center of every eighth block. When you can’t afford new, you make do. I thought of Mama Alice who ate, slept and breathed the “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without” philosophy. Bless her, I thought, how much she taught me, how much she left that doesn’t demand time and money and attention like the Dixie Dew. I was convinced that had Mama Alice been alive today, she would have insisted on doing a bed-and-breakfast herself. And the tearoom. She’d be beating up pineapple muffins at midnight, setting places before she went to bed … and loving every guest, looking at pictures of their families, sending them off with recipes and cuttings from whatever plant or shrub they had admired blooming in her yard.

When I’d cut the last curve of the pineapple stencil, I laid my X-ACTO knife carefully beside my drawing board. I held my stencil to the light and said, “Darn good. In fact, damn good,” for someone who spent too much of my art training teaching kiddy balloon and papier-mâché crafts. Every day I’d laughed and hugged a hundred kids, then gone home to the most morose man in the world. More than morose, he hated everything, starting with me just because I happened to be in the room.

I said softly to the ceiling, “If it takes everything in me, I will get to the bottom of what’s going on in this town. I will find out who pushed Mama Alice and who’s trying to kill me. I will not live with threats on my life.” I’d gone through too many years of playing Little Red Riding Hood, going down the garden path with my basket of goodies not suspecting the death wolf waited in my own hometown.

I drew the outlines of each pineapple on the painted floor.

“It’s Pink Panther paint to me,” Scott said from the kitchen. I hadn’t heard his truck in the driveway or the kitchen door open.

I laughed. “That’s better than the way Ida Plum chooses to describe it.”

Scott picked up the small brush and filled the pattern with pink paint. We worked silently for the most part, surrounded and filled from fingertips to toes with good talk from WUNC Radio. I worked until my back felt bent and Scott filled in the last pineapple on the last corner.

Usually Scott would only paint with his own brushes, but he didn’t have one small enough for this delicate job. He insisted no one could properly clean brushes but himself, so he took our used brushes to the basement to clean while I stood in the dining room doorway and tried to see the completed room in my mind’s eye. Polyurethane would go over the pineapples tomorrow. A couple of coats and they’d be sealed to take a lot of wear, plus the shine would add light and a clean look. The one solid wall would be papered in a calico print of pinks and white and green. Valances of quilted fabric that matched the cloth napkins and complemented the tablecloths would finish it off. Elegant but warm, that was the look I wanted. Most of all filled with paying customers.

Scott came in with clean brushes. He smelled of turpentine and soap as he reached for the paper-towel holder. “You clean a good brush and it’ll last,” he said, kneading and stroking the bristles.

“Is it possible someone wants this bed-and-breakfast to fail?” I asked. “If it goes, I go, and another piece of fine old historic property gets eaten by the bulldozers. Who would want that and why?”

Scott popped a beer, poured it, foaming and blooming a fine head, into a glass. He sipped long and loud. “Ah, babe,” he said. “You got all the puzzle pieces you need. It’s putting them together that’s going to take some doing.”

We went out to the front porch. Next door, where the new condos were being built, the carpenters had quit early and quiet settled in on the porch. Scott and I sat in the swing and stared through the magnolia trees at the gray colonial façade. “Who in Littleboro is going to buy three-hundred-thousand-dollar condos? Somebody is going to lose their shirt … or petticoat, or both,” I said.

The sign out front said: ALCAMY COMPANY, ANOTHER FINE COMMUNITY. It told us nothing.

“Like fast-food places,” I said. “It’s probably a chain. But Littleboro doesn’t seem to me to be the place for condos.”

“Ha.” Scott sat up straight. “Think opposite. Fast food needs traffic. Condos … retirement condos need the quiet life. That’s Littleboro.”

“That was Littleboro,” I said. “But I think you’re on to something. Before last week, Littleboro was a quiet, clean, green place in which to be part of a community, play bridge or go to Pinehurst to golf … your ideal village.”

“And it will be again,” Scott said, “when this bizarre business gets cleaned up.”

I shook the ice in my glass. “You talk like it’s a case of acne. If so, Miss Lavinia and Father Roderick got taken with it terminally.” I finished the last swallow of my tea. “There are clues and I don’t think Ossie DelGardo is doing a damn thing he can’t do with his feet on his desk. The most effort that man puts out each week is to collect his paycheck.”

I punched a pillow I’d taken from a chair and held in my lap, scaring Sherman, who jumped from the porch roof onto the top of a column, then into a cedar that swayed as he backed his way down furiously. When he reached the ground, he streaked toward the back. “Wonder if that was Sherman on the roof I heard yesterday?”

“Before you found the earring? And thought it was Reba?”

“Reba was here … sometime. That earring is hers and it’s real. Here she is living under a tree … in a tree … whatever … and wearing who knows how much of a fortune in jewels.”

“Only in Littleboro.” Scott laughed. “All this sounds like one of Ida Plum’s stories … except the murders. Ida Plum’s stories never had violence. They were just bizarre and crazy and strange and loony.”

“Reba’s a little puzzle piece we can work with,” I said. “She fits somewhere. That jewelry belonged to somebody.”

“Jesus,” Scott said. “Remember, Reba said Jesus gave her that necklace.”

“Oh Lord,” I said. “And Jesus saves S and H Green Stamps, too. Remember that old joke?”

“No,” Scott said, and laughed. “But both of us are thinking in the back of our minds that it’s a possibility Reba is trucking all over town loaded to her scalp with Miss Lavinia’s jewelry. What a hoot! Who would believe it?”

“I believe it,” said I. “And my good name goes riding along with her. Oh Lord, does it?”

When Scott left, I stood on the porch for a few minutes. Sherman rubbed my ankles until I picked him up.

A part of me wanted to ask Scott to stay. To say we’d make dinner, something hot and peppered, full of garlic and herbs, and then … I didn’t know what came after that. Or what I really wanted to come after that. So I watched his blue truck zip up the street, around the courthouse and completely out of sight. I stopped my train of thought before it jumped the track and headed toward the river or someplace more dangerous in my life.