An Angel to Die For Read online

  “Somebody will be out when it’s lighter to see if we can track this fellow down,” the sergeant said. He slapped his gloved hands together and showered me with crystals of snow. “I doubt if he’ll be back, but be sure and keep your doors locked.”

  “Do you think it could be Jasper Totherow?” I asked.

  “Could be, but I can’t imagine what in tarnation he’s looking for.”

  I couldn’t either. My uncle’s coffin had been in the shed until it was hauled to the county barn. Had there been something valuable in the coffin that Jasper—or someone else—knew about? And if so, how did it get there? Faris Haskell was supposed to have embezzled a lot of money before he died. I had always heard you can’t take it with you; maybe Uncle Faris was the exception.

  Sheriff Bonner came out later that morning to tell me that “at this point in time” they hadn’t been able to locate the trespasser who’d been waving around a flashlight in our barn lot. “But we did find tire tracks just off the main road,” he added. “Looks like he must’ve parked there and walked to your place, or else somebody was waiting for him there.”

  “Great. Now they think there could be two of them,” I said after the sheriff left.

  “What about your friend in Atlanta?” Augusta suggested during lunch. “Do you think you might feel safer there for a while?”

  “Probably, but I’m still hoping I’ll hear from Ola Cress. I’d better hang around here for a while at least.”

  “And what if you don’t hear?”

  “Then I’ll have to report Joey missing and call in the police, but that would give that rotten Pershing Gaines an equal claim.”

  Augusta crumbled crackers into her tomato soup. “And the young man in England? I don’t suppose you’ve spoken with him.”

  “Then you suppose wrong. Are all angels this nosy? As a matter of fact, we had a long talk just the other day.”

  “And?”

  “And what? We talked, that’s all. Miss you . . . how are you . . . that kind of thing. He said my friend Dottie had told him about Maggie.”

  She nodded. “I imagine he’s hurt that you didn’t let him know.”

  “We don’t always follow the rule book at times like that,” I said.

  “So what now?”

  I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you care about this man? Because if you don’t, I don’t think you should rope him along.”

  I thought about that for a minute, then laughed. “You mean string him along! You sound like Dottie.”

  “He isn’t going to wait forever,” my friend had told me during our last conversation together. “I guess you’ll just have to decide whether or not you really give a damn.”

  “Well, thank you, Rhett,” I had replied. I couldn’t say more because just then I was too confused to think. I still was.

  The temperature hovered around freezing and snow still covered the ground that afternoon. I braved the cold long enough to bring in wood for a fire, then popped corn and ate it in front of the cheery blaze while I tried to get interested in the latest best-seller. But the fire was the only thing that was cheery, and I couldn’t concentrate on the book.

  Would the person who had been roaming around out there come back tonight? If he did, he’d be in danger of breaking a leg on the icy crust of snow—and it would serve him right! I couldn’t imagine anyone being fool enough to try, still I made sure the doors were double locked and drew the curtains across the sitting-room windows so I wouldn’t be on display. Now and then I took a quick peek at the white expanse of snow and watched the gray-blue dusk seep gradually across it until everything glowed with an eerie light. And I thought of the day when Maggie and I, half-sick from winter colds, had sneaked outside to gather a dishpan full of forbidden snow while Mom was upstairs sewing. Later she tracked us down in the kitchen where we were attempting to make snow ice cream with milk, sugar, and vanilla. I was inspired to dribble in about half a bottle of green food coloring that spattered the countertop, floor, and our clothing, so our efforts didn’t remain a secret long.

  “Now you’ve done it!” Maggie fumed at me. “Mama told us not to go outside and you’ve gone and dyed the whole kitchen green. She’s gonna kill us!” But our mother only laughed and shook her head. “If I didn’t know better I’d think I was in Oz!” she said, and even helped us save some of our ghastly concoction in the freezer where it stayed until we threw it out to make room for peaches the following summer.

  But she never knew what happened to her china girl with the kitten.

  Poor Mom! For weeks, even months after it disappeared, she fretted over the missing figurine, and even as recently as the summer Maggie went away, wondered aloud what had become of it.

  “I’ve always kind of suspected your sister broke my little porcelain girl. The one with the kitten, remember?” Mom sat at her piano aimlessly walking her fingers up and down the keys. Maggie had been gone less than a month, and neither Mom nor I had stopped hoping she’d come home. It was late afternoon, usually the time we started preparations for supper and Dad was soon due in from the fields, but my mother showed no inclination to do anything about it. I recognized fragments of a tune: “My Darling Clementine.” It was the only song my sister ever learned to play and she almost drove us crazy with it.

  I shrugged. “Why do you think that?” I asked as she repeated the tune.

  “She looked guilty every time I mentioned it,” Mom said. “Maggie never was a very good liar.” Suddenly she brought her hands down with a discordant crash, dropped her head, and cried, “Oh, Prentice, why doesn’t she come home?”

  I stood behind my mother and encircled her in my arms. My tears slipped into her hair as I bent to kiss her. “Just give her time,” I said. “You know Maggie, Mama. She’ll probably turn up when you least expect her.”

  I lied, of course. Maggie wasn’t coming home until our father made amends, but Joseph Winston Dobson wasn’t going to welcome home his wayward daughter. He was too damn stubborn! I think Mom knew this as well as I did, but neither of us wanted to admit it.

  I also knew what had happened to the china figurine. Maggie was about seven and I was thirteen when we knocked it off the console table playing at “Peter Pan” in the living room, and both of us were horrified at what we’d done.

  The porcelain girl with the kitten had been a gift to our mother from her first piano teacher, the one who had encouraged her, and it was one of Mom’s most cherished possessions. Even today I can remember watching helplessly as the figurine crashed to the floor and broke into two jagged pieces.

  Immediately my little sister started to howl. “Look what we’ve done! Mama’s gonna kill us! Prentice, what are we going to do?”

  “Hush now,” I told her, scooping up the pieces. “Maybe we can glue it back together so she won’t notice. Hurry! Help me find the glue before Mom gets back from the store.” We had been warned about running in the living room, but I had been reading the story to Maggie, and today, caught up in the thrill of the tale, my little sister “flew” too close to the table.

  But the glue wouldn’t hold no matter how much we applied, and when we heard Mom’s car in the driveway, I guessed how a deer must feel when caught in the headlights.

  “Ohmygosh, here she comes! What’ll we do with it?” Maggie wiped gooey fingers on her shirt.

  “We’ll have to hide it,” I said. “Let’s hope she won’t realize it’s gone—for a while anyway.” Maybe by that time I could think of an excuse.

  “But where?” Maggie’s lower lip started to tremble. “Prentice, you won’t tell, will you?”

  “I’m not gonna tell . . . hurry now, help me clean up this mess and wash your hands.” My sister had been the one who crashed into the table and made the china figurine totter and fall, but she wouldn’t have been running in such a blind panic if I hadn’t been close on her heels, “tick-tocking” like the dreaded crocodile that swallowed the clock.

  “Promise?” Maggie stared
at the broken halves of what once had been a pink-cheeked child holding a gray kitten. The kitten was forever batting at a ball of blue china yarn. It wouldn’t bat it anymore.

  “I promise,” I said, hastily sponging off the counter-top. “Tell you what, let’s each keep a half. It will be a token of our pledge to each other—just like couples exchange rings when they get married.”

  Maggie almost smiled. “Really?”

  “Really. Only this means we promise to be loyal as sisters.” I snatched a couple of plastic grocery bags from the pantry and wrapped a broken half in each, then gave one to my sister. “Careful now, don’t cut yourself. Put it in a place Mom would never think to look, and I’ll do the same with mine. But we’ll have to hide them somewhere really good.” From the kitchen window, I saw our mother, arms filled with groceries, approaching the house. The two of us fled upstairs.

  “If she asks, just say you don’t know anything about it,” I warned breathlessly, “and I’ll do the same. It will be our secret.”

  She turned to me at the top of the stairs. “We’ll keep them always and never, never tell?”

  “Always,” I said.

  I stuffed my half of the evidence inside a sock, then tucked it away in a lunch box I’d had since grade school. It was still there.

  I never knew what Maggie did with hers.

  When the phone rang, it startled me so I must have jumped because Noodles sprang yowling from my lap.

  “Anything happening out there?” Aunt Zorah wanted to know.

  Good. She hadn’t yet heard about last night’s excitement, and I didn’t mean to tell her. As town librarian, if Aunt Zorah didn’t know about something, it hadn’t happened yet, and apparently the news hadn’t made the rounds.

  “Did Bumbling Bonner bring justice to Liberty Bend?” I heard my aunt’s beaded earrings rattling against the receiver when she laughed.

  “Too cold,” I said, keeping my tone light. “Guess the snow kept our ghoulish vandals away.”

  “So nobody showed up, huh?” I could tell she was making an effort not to sound interested.

  “If he did, they didn’t see him.” At least that part was true.

  “I reckon you’re better off staying there than trying to drive on these slick roads,” she said. “They closed the library today, and I doubt if we’ll be open tomorrow either. You okay for milk and bread?”

  I assured my aunt I was fine and hoped she was the same. “Don’t go out unless you absolutely have to,” I said. “There’s ice everywhere.” I hoped the library would stay closed for a few more days so there would be less chance for her to hear what else had been going on at Smokerise.

  I was putting another log on the fire a few minutes later when the telephone rang again. Aunt Zorah had probably forgotten to tell me something, I thought as I watched red sparks fly up the chimney.

  But it wasn’t Aunt Zorah.

  “Is this the Dobson place?” a man’s voice asked.

  “Who’s calling please?”

  “I’m trying to locate the Dobsons in Liberty Bend. Who is this?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t believe I got your name,” I said. And then the line went dead.

  Awareness flared like a cold flame inside me and I slammed down the receiver as if it had been scorching hot. I had a nasty feeling I had just been talking to Pershing Gaines.

  What would I say if he called back? And where was he? If he knew my phone number, then chances were he also knew where I lived.

  Within three minutes I had turned on every light in the house, plus the radio in Mom’s room and the television downstairs. Pershing Gaines mustn’t know I was here alone.

  I was sitting at the foot of the stairs with my chin on my chest thinking it couldn’t get any worse than this when all the lights went out.

  “Oh, hell!” I said.

  “Oh, Prentice!” Augusta echoed. “Is that a mature and responsible solution to your problems?”

  “Don’t talk to me about being responsible,” I said. “Just what were you doing while somebody dug up Uncle Faris and put that woman in his place? Where were you when that fool with a flashlight prowled about our property in the middle of the night? What kind of angel are you, anyway?”

  “Prentice dear, surely you must know I’m always close by.”

  “Well, that’s just great, but can’t you do anything about anything?”

  She looked at me sadly. “I think you forget. I’m a guardian angel, not a bodyguard. I can only advise, help you to work things out for yourself,” Augusta reminded me. “And right now I advise you to look around for a flashlight or maybe a few candles, and it wouldn’t hurt to add some wood to that fire. I believe this house is getting cold already.” And although she tried not to show it, I detected a slight angelic shiver.

  How could she possibly be cold? Augusta had traded her bathrobe for a long skirt of shimmery violet that contained enough material to make curtains for Buckingham Palace. Her silvery blouse was as soft as clouds with billowing sleeves and violet-lined hood.

  For supper, Augusta and I ate scrambled eggs and toast by candlelight in front of the fire and I couldn’t help but think how nice it would be if Rob were there instead. At least I supposed it was Rob. I hadn’t seen him in so long, whenever I tried to picture his face, he looked a lot like Harrison Ford in 1930s archaeological attire—but without the bullwhip.

  Augusta looked at me and smiled. “That ocean’s not as big as it used to be,” she said. “He could be here by tomorrow.”

  “I know, but right now I think I need you more.” I hoped Rob would wait, but at the present I had more urgent problems.

  When the telephone rang again, I didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Ma’am, do you recognize this hat?” Deputy Weber stood on our back porch in a puddle of melting snow holding a soggy, mud-caked cap that on closer inspection appeared to have once been purple.

  I shook my head. My dad would have rather been chased barefoot through a briar patch by a swarm of yellow jackets than wear a thing like that. “If I knew whose it was, I’d be embarrassed to admit it,” I said, smiling. I felt much better since the power had come on during the night, and Augusta rose early to bake her apple cinnamon loaf that now smelled good enough to entice a lame man to walk. It enticed Deputy Weber.

  “Somebody’s been baking mighty early,” he said with a couple of gentlemanly sniffs.

  “And it’s still hot, and so’s the coffee. I was just about to have some.” I held open the door. “Come in and join me.”

  He held the dripping cap away from him, then laid it carefully on the doormat. “Well, thank you, I believe I will.”

  The temperature had been rising since daybreak and only patches of snow remained, leaving a gooey landscape of mud. As the deputy wiped his feet, I looked again at the dirty purple hat. It had earflaps.

  “Suzie Wright,” I said.

  “What about her?” The policeman looked up as I filled his coffee cup.

  “She saw a man wearing a hat like this walking near our property the other day, and he ran into the woods when he saw her coming.” I cut a thick slice of the loaf and set it in front of him. “I reported it, remember? You said you’d picked up a vagrant near here and put him on the bus to Atlanta. Do you think that cap might have been his?”

  He frowned. “I doubt it. Somebody would’ve noticed it before now. We found this hanging from a bush between here and the road like it had been snagged when somebody tried to duck underneath. Too dark to see it last night, but it waved at me like a flag this morning.”

  I watched the deputy’s face as he took a bite of the apple loaf, then followed it with deep swallows of coffee. His eyes were closed and his mouth had that same slaphappy expression most men get only after watching a weekend of continuous football. If Augusta could market her recipes, they would probably be illegal, I thought.

  “I’ll try to catch Suzie back at the post office,” he said after seconds all around. “Maybe sh
e can tell me if this is the cap she saw.”

  How many men actually go out in public wearing purple hats with earflaps? And what was this one doing hanging around our property?

  “Maybe one of Sonny Gaines’s clan,” I suggested to Augusta after the deputy left with a third piece of cinnamon loaf swaddled in a napkin. (For his partner, he said.) “Probably one of his brothers. Wonder how many there are?” I pictured a slovenly line of them—kind of like the seven dwarfs, only much bigger, all wearing ragged overalls and carrying shotguns. “ ‘Purple Hat’ was probably assigned to ‘case the joint’ and see if we had Joey—which should mean they don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure, Prentice,” Augusta said. She sat at the foot of the stairs with her frothy skirt spread about her and examined the notebook she carried in her bottomless tapestry bag. “It might turn out that this man has no connection with the Gaines family. I wouldn’t put all my chickens in one sack if I were you.”

  I smiled. “You mean eggs in one basket?”

  “That either.” Augusta looked briefly at me with her calm-sea eyes, then turned to a fresh page in her note-book. “Do you suppose your sister might have mentioned Ola Cress to your mother, perhaps in a card or a letter?”

  “I don’t think so. She didn’t write much, and she had only been living there a few months before she was killed. We didn’t even know how to find her when Dad died.”

  “Still, we might be overlooking some clue—maybe something in your sister’s things that came in the mail. Do you mind if I have another look?”

  “Of course not, but you were there when I opened the package. There isn’t anything else to see.”

  I hovered close as Augusta combed almost reverently through the pitiful remnants of Maggie’s life, hoping she would find something I had missed. Perhaps a business card, an address, or a book of matches that had slipped behind the lining of the handbag would lead us to Ola Cress’s frequent hangouts and ultimately to Joey. That was the way it happened in books, and after all, Augusta was an angel. Surely she must have some sort of heavenly radar to put us on the right path to finding my sister’s baby. But it didn’t take long to learn there really wasn’t anything to discover, and I think Augusta was even more disappointed than I was.