Chapter Three

I grabbed my old plaid windbreaker from the hook on the back porch and walked down Main Street to Littleboro Cemetery. Back at the house I knew the phone was ringing, people were in and out. Before I’d left, one guest called to cancel. I couldn’t help but wonder if he really had a last-minute change of plans or if the news of Miss Lovingood’s demise had already traveled two hundred miles. And if so, how much farther would it go? Bad news always wore winged shoes. And gossip danced with taps on its heels.

“Go,” Ida Plum said. “You need some fresh air. I’ll hold the fort. Mind the store. Tend the shop … whatever.” She waved me away with her dust cloth. The vacuum cleaner stood behind her like a retired soldier, worn but still staunch. Mama Alice’s stalwart old Hoover, its burgundy bag of a paunch faded as damask. Its motor sounded like gravel in a blender.

I walked down Main Street. Verna Crowell’s lilac bushes were lit with lavender candles. I drew in the deep blue smell. The old lilacs were thick as a hedge behind Verna’s wrought-iron fence, and the fence was so rusted and sprawled you had to know it was there to see it. Something moved behind the curtains at one of the windows. Verna? Or her darn rabbit, Robert Redford? Sometimes he hopped onto a chair and sat looking out, his red eyes like two tiny coals in the darkened rooms. Verna’s old galleon of a house begged for paint, gallons and gallons and gallons of paint, and a team of ten men with ladders and buckets and brushes to apply it. Verna’s house was even worse than Mama Alice’s. If Scott Smith was smart he’d open up a paint store in this town and take food stamps in trade. Except people like Verna didn’t get food stamps. They had money, probably lots of money, yet lived like street people once removed.

I’d walked to the cemetery a lot in the months I’d been back.

It had been six months since Mama Alice died, been buried next to Granddaddy McKenzie, who died when I was a week old. Beside their graves was my mother’s, Alice McKenzie Henry’s. Mama had stepped off the curb in front of the courthouse straight into the path of a transfer truck. She was killed instantly. I was seven, in the second grade. Mama Alice had come for me, walked me home and been mother, grandmother and good friend until last year. Beside my mother’s grave was a flat, empty space, marked and set aside for Andrew Buie Henry, who went to Vietnam and never came back. Missing in action. All my childhood, those words haunted me. I wanted to believe they meant my father was still alive, that Andrew Henry was more than a framed photograph on my dresser and a few scattered memories of a tall man with dark hair and a deep laugh. The grave was empty. That meant it waited for something or someone, as an empty space lay marked and waiting for Lavinia Lovingood, who’d come home to die. I hoped that she, herself, had come home to live, make a life for herself in Littleboro.

The Lovingood mausoleum was a solid cement little house on the hill in the back corner of Littleboro. It had been there all my life, and I never thought much about it. The name Lovingood never meant anything to me before either.

The mausoleum was big, impressive, carved with pillars and scrolls, ornate columns. Tall cedars stood at each corner of a rusted iron fence. Several dogwood trees leaned near the two tombs, tombs impressive enough to encase Pharaohs.

The Lovingood section was only equaled in Littleboro by another heavily fenced family plot in the opposite corner which held the Merritt mausoleum. Inside the Merritts’ fence, a woman in a faded yellow dress knelt over a grave.

I stopped, stood very still. I felt as if I’d been caught somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. My own family plot with Mama and Mama Alice was far down the hill, beyond the fountain, little benches, plantings and trees.

The woman at the Merritt mausoleum arranged a vase of brown plastic chrysanthemums on the ground at her feet and talked to herself. “I miss my sweetheart, my love, precious…” I started away, but my footsteps on the gravel startled the woman, who turned around. “Oh,” she said. Both hands flew immediately to her cheeks. “Who’s there? What do you want?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“I’m not used to anyone being in this cemetery,” the woman said. She seemed calmer now, walked toward the fence and peered at me. “You’re Alice McKenzie’s girl, aren’t you?” Her small eyes, black as onyx, were bright and piercing in her patchwork face of heavy rouge over extremely white skin and a thick stitching of wrinkles. “Miss Tempie?” I asked. I’d taken piano lessons from Tempie Merritt for a year when I was eight, came home crying with red fingers after each session. After the nightmares began, Mama Alice let me stop the lessons. The nightmares also stopped. I couldn’t tell my grandmother then how Miss Tempie whacked my hands with a ruler for every wrong note, how the huge Merritt house two blocks over was always cold and smelled of rubbing alcohol. To this day the smell of rubbing alcohol made me gag. Tempie was deathly afraid of germs. And yet here she was still alive, more than twenty years later, germs and all. I wondered if she still taught? How many rulers she’d broken during her teaching career? Or how many little fingers and egos she had bruised and damaged? I wondered if today’s parents knew and still accepted her “teaching methods.”

Miss Tempie was even thinner than I remembered; her bones seemed almost sharp enough to puncture the faded cotton shirtwaist dress. And her soiled white sweater, crookedly buttoned, looked angled as a bent clothes hanger. She tried to smooth her hair, almost white now, with touches of the blond she used to be. She still wore her thin hair pulled back, pinned in an irregular and awkward roll, with wisps escaping around her head like a swarm of white moths.

“It’s Harold,” Miss Tempie whispered. She turned to look behind her. A large man in dark green work clothes and a bill cap stood beside Miss Tempie’s old black Cadillac, a monster of a car so old its fenders, spots on the trunk and hood, looked as though they’d been polished through to the body paint. The man held a shovel. His bulk cast a thick shadow toward us.

“Harold?” I didn’t know any Harolds. Certainly not a Harold Merritt. Miss Tempie didn’t have a brother, nor a son that I knew about. Who was Harold?

“My poodle. I know you’re not supposed to, but it was the family plot, and Harold was with us nineteen years. That’s old for a poodle. I couldn’t bury him just anywhere.” Miss Tempie twisted her handkerchief with a tatted edge. Her fingers looked knotted and blue.

Oh God, I thought, that’s what money would do. The Merritts had owned this town along with the Lovingoods, only the Merritts lived longer, held on to their money and influence. Miss Tempie probably had slipped whoever gravedigger was in charge of the cemetery a twenty or two and together they smuggled dead Harold into the family plot. Nobody knew or cared, or if they did, they looked the other way. Miss Tempie turned back to the grave. “I didn’t want to let him go,” she said. Her voice quavered like a tired old mourning dove. “He slept at the foot of my bed every night. This last year … this last year, he couldn’t climb up there by himself and I had to lift him. He weighed next to nothing toward the end. And then one morning he wasn’t there. Not the real Harold, just his little fur suit.” She bent to the ground weeping, crying, moaning.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, and touched her shoulder. Sad to think all she had to love was a poodle. I thought Harold was probably the kind of poodle that humped all the kids’ legs as they took piano lessons. I felt lucky to have escaped knowing him. Lucky I didn’t have to go in that house, where the odor was so dark and thick I used to come out and take a dozen deep breaths to get the smell out of my lungs.

I couldn’t go to the McKenzie family plot, though the spring grass on Mama Alice’s grave would be bright and tender. Too much sorrow for me still.

I walked away as quietly as I could. All that wet and loud grief was getting to me. Miss Tempie had surely livened up my walk “to get away from it all.” Until today the cemetery had been a fine and private place.

Still not ready to go home, I walked past the Dixie Dew, around the courthouse square, and headed for the library in the new big concrete box of the Government Complex. The whole thing was so cold and modern it made me think I was in another town. One without heart and soul and history. The old library, the one I’d grown up with, had been on the next block, a redbrick building that had mellowed almost brown over the years. Inside it was full of paneling, balconies and tall shelves you needed a rolling stepladder to reach. I loved it. I’d spent half my growing-up years reading in one of the wing chairs beside the green marble fireplace, or on rainy days gazing out the tall windows toward the courthouse and the statue of the Confederate soldier. In the winter I could see past it through the water oak trees along Main Street to the blue roof of Mama Alice’s house.

As soon as I stepped through the double glass doors, Ethelene Smart said, “Wasn’t it just awful about Lavinia Lovingood?” Ethelene had been reference librarian in Littleboro for as long as I remembered. “That poor woman,” she said, and laughed. “Not that you could call any of the Lovingoods poor.” Ethelene wore her long brown hair, heavily streaked with gray, pulled back in a ponytail that switched and swayed when she moved. She had a pencil poked behind one ear. Her movements were brisk as a wren and she talked in a high chirrup of a voice. “Lord, those Lovingoods had money all the way back to King Midas. They were drinking tea out of little china cups when the rest of us around here were still using gourd dippers.” She took me to a large brass wall plaque in the local history room that said it had been donated by the Lovingood family. Then Ethelene pulled a Littleboro Historical Society book off the shelf and pointed out a blurred photo of the old Lovingood house that had stood on this corner until the Government Complex was built. It looked as large and imposing in the photo as I remembered, white and ghostly, tall columns and wide porch.

A patron dinged the dinger at the checkout desk and Ethelene hurried over as fast as any spinster librarian in her sensible shoes could go.

I was too tired and distracted to read magazines; none of the new novels grabbed my attention and I didn’t think I wanted to involve myself in a murder mystery. I’d read all the “cat” mysteries, and I didn’t like those “fast city cop” or “macho men on houseboats” types.

I didn’t go into the drugstore. Malinda was off on Wednesdays. She had probably taken her son, Elvis, to the park or fishing or to hang around a service station while her car was being greased and the oil changed. Malinda might be raising her child by herself, though she said her mother would get her feathers ruffled if anybody ever hinted at such a thing. Malinda did try to do a few macho things with her son. She quoted all kinds of statistics about black males to me: health and longevity and education and role models. Elvis wouldn’t lack anything Malinda could give him, I thought, but a live-in father. You can grow up without one, but not without a lot of scars and questions and anger. I knew about that and sometimes I tried to lay all that blame in my past with Ben. You can’t divorce someone you haven’t been married to, but ending the relationship feels the same, leaves scars, too. So does life. No one gets through it without some physical and emotional scratches and mending. Funny though, Miss Lavinia, as old as she was, had looked so serene, so at peace with herself, when she had checked in at the Dixie Dew. I had been taken with her countenance; she was old, but she was regal and there was a glow about her. A glow that had gone overnight into a death pallor. It was hard for me to believe. On my way home, I skirted the old courthouse, its redbrick the same mellowed brown the old library had been. At least that building had not changed, just been outgrown, and since it stood on its own little island in the middle of town it couldn’t be added on to. Hence the new Government Complex, built behind it and just a step away. The old courthouse was still in use, and in some little basement office a clerk filled out the death certificate on Lavinia Lovingood, age eighty-something, born Carelock County, died Carelock County. And somewhere in some small cubbyhole at The Mess I wondered if Fanny Upchurch was typing out Miss Lavinia’s obituary.

Would they run it front page, not giving her age, of course, but a couple paragraphs about the Lovingoods’ being one of Littleboro’s most prominent families, and so on? And a photo of Miss Lavinia from her debutante days? Or her college yearbook? Somehow I knew she was beautiful. I just hoped the obituary didn’t include the information that she died in the Dixie Dew, recently renovated and now open as a B and B by local native Beth Henry.

Bruce Beckner from the police department had said, “Don’t touch anything in this room.” He had taken Miss Lavinia’s handbag, looked through her wallet, credit cards, and flipped through her cash like the winner at a gaming table. “Ten thousand dollars.” He whistled. “That’s traveling.” He fanned through the bills with the tips of his fingers.

They’d sealed off the room, just in case. “Until the lab reports are in,” Bruce had said. Right now, for all I cared, they could seal off that room forever.

And they left Miss Lavinia’s little car parked out front: some sort of cute little foreign-looking sporty convertible. Scott said having it parked out there didn’t tear down the neighborhood a bit. It was locked and Ossie DelGardo would get around to moving it in a few days. Until then, it did grace the neighborhood with an elegant presence, though a glance at it did send a chill of something ominous down the back of my neck.

Before Bruce came with his handy-dandy roll of crime scene tape, Ida Plum had gone into Miss Lavinia’s room and pulled the eel-skin suit and the lace blouse off the hangers. Then Ida had gone into Miss Lavinia’s drawers and gotten a slip, bra and panties, stockings and shoes. “I think she’d want to be buried well,” Ida Plum said, smoothing across her arm the most beautiful underwear I’d ever seen. “Handmade,” she sighed. “I’ll drop them by Eikenberry’s on my way home.” Trust Ida Plum to think of such things, the finishing touches.

I felt like the whole thing with Miss Lavinia was so strange, so unreal. Walking helped me get my feet back on the ground.

I turned the corner at the courthouse and remembered twenty years or so ago there had been talk about tearing the old courthouse down. Thank goodness some county commissioner or historic-minded group had opposed it. A sleek black marble glass box would stick out in this town like a pyramid. Besides, I snickered, they’d have to move the statue of the Confederate soldier. I could see him from my bedroom window. Always on guard, his rifle pointed to the sky, as I slept, protected. Had he been Miss Lavinia’s last look, that stone statue through the trees holding up the sky? A little halt in time? She’d been as close to home as she could get. I was glad about that. Littleboro had been able to give her something, and the sight of Mama Alice’s house being restored must have been a small comfort. Even when the rest of the town whispered loudly I’d never make it a successful bed-and-breakfast.

I stepped past a stack of cement bags. Behind it lay lumber, scaffolding. The Redfern house had been torn down, a façade of Southern homes built in its place. Condominiums. Ida Plum had said the Catholic diocese was building those. Seven units followed the façade like cars on a train. Who would buy those? How many people had moved to Littleboro last year? Three? Probably those three were not looking for two-hundred-eighty-thousand-dollar condominiums, but somebody might think big, bigger than I, and they’d have either more money or better credit or know something I didn’t know.

As I opened my own gate, I saw the swing of something orange-red on the lower limbs of the huge water oak in front of the town’s water tower. Crazy Reba was back in town. Oh Lord, she’d probably be at the funeral tomorrow. Not knowing where she was, dressed in parts of five different outfits and singing nursery rhymes. That was sad, too. Crazy Reba had been plain Reba Satterfield in high school. A little loud and strange, but she’d graduated with the rest of them. Married somebody, had five kids in four years, and her mind kicked out. She was one of the revolving-door cases for the courts and hospitals for the mentally ill. Not considered a danger to herself or others, she lived on the streets and under the tree, hanging her clothes across the limbs, sleeping on and under them at night. Mama Alice had fed her, given her blankets, only to find in the morning that Reba had used the blankets to drape Mama Alice’s boxwoods. Reba never slept inside. She said she didn’t like walls. Sad, I thought again, and the sadness seemed like a gray cloud following me home.

On my own walk, I meandered, checked Mama Alice’s boxwoods for spider mites, noted the grass needed mowing. There was an apron of a yard on each side of the walk, usually mowed with the push mower Mama Alice had used until last year. Mama Alice must have known Miss Lavinia, I thought. Maybe she would have known why Lavinia Lovingood had come back, but Mama Alice was dead. For a moment I ached for those arms I’d always gone to for answers and comfort.

Ida Plum met me in the kitchen. She waved the wand to the vacuum cleaner like a dark warning flag. “Don’t go upstairs,” she said. “They’ve dusted for prints. Miss Lavinia was murdered.”

Well hell, I thought, that’s just what Ossie DelGardo wants. To turn Littleboro into some big-city crime scene. Oh, he is in his glory, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. There had to be a glitch somewhere. At least I hoped there was.