"You really are an angel," I said, and meant it. "I just can"t believe somebody I"ve known all my life murdered Otto and might be trying to do the same to me. These people are our friends, Augusta. It"s awful not to know who to trust anymore."
She set the steaming cup in front of me. "Drink up now," she said. "We"ll think about it in the morning."
But I was forced to think about it a little earlier than I intended when Rusty Echols phoned the next day just as I was getting out of the shower. All the students who had been absent the day before were accounted for during the time I was thrown from my bicycle, he told me. Except for one.
"We haven"t been able to locate Duncan Oliver," Rusty said, "and frankly, I wouldn"t be too surprised if the little devil might"ve had something to do with it. It wouldn"t be the first time he"s pulled a dangerous stunt like that. I know he was the one who threw that rock from an overpa.s.s and damaged some tourist"s fancy foreign job, but we never could prove it. Even his own mama can"t seem to keep up with him."
"You mean she doesn"t know where he is?" I asked.
"I mean n.o.body answers when I call their place. Checked with the neighbors, and they said Duncan"s mom quit her job at the mill and went to work somewhere else. None of them seemed to know where. Hadn"t seen either of them for a couple of days."
"What about his father?"
"He"s not in the picture," the policeman said. "As soon as we locate them, I"ll get back to you on this. Meanwhile, I"d stay close to home if I were you.
"By the way," he added, "Chief McBride went back to that place where you said the rope was tied and found fiber strands embedded in the tree bark. It"s not much, but at least it"s something to go on."
When the phone rang just after breakfast, I hoped it was Rusty or his uncle calling to tell me they"d arrested whoever was making my life miserable, but it was Tess Estes phoning to let me know Mamie was up to having a visitor if it still suited me to come. I told her I"d be there in a couple of hours, and had started out the door when I remembered it might be a good thing to let Vesta know where I was going. There wasn"t room in the doghouse for Mildred and me both.
"I don"t suppose you"ve heard from her," I said.
"Not so much as a mumblin" word," my grandmother told me. "And how is your head this morning?"
"Got a lot of straight yellow hair on the outside and not much in the inside," I said. "Other than that, it"s okay."
"Ha. Ha." She didn"t sound amused. "If that"s the best you can come up with, you do need to take it easy today. And just why are driving to Charlotte?"
"I"m going to see Mamie Estes," I told her.
"Who?"
"Mamie Estes. The last of the Mystic Six."
"Oh. Mama always spoke of her as Mamie Trammell," my grandmother said. "You don"t mean she"s still alive?"
"A hundred and two," I told her. "And every minute counts. Gotta run!"
But before I left, I telephoned the Better Health Clinic and left a message for Dr. Ivey. "Just tell him I called to let him know I"m okay," I told the receptionist.
"If you"ll hold a minute, I think I can chase him down for you," she said.
"No, that"s all right. Thanks. I"m fine, really. All patched up."
If we spoke on the phone, Harrison Ivey might ask me out. Or maybe he wouldn"t, and I wasn"t sure which bothered me more. But I couldn"t deny that I was attracted to him. The thing that puzzled me the most, I think, was that he wasn"t one bit like Jarvis.
Augusta seemed unusually quiet during the drive to Charlotte, but I was rea.s.sured by her company, especially after what happened the day before. I tried not to think about where I might have ended up if Augusta hadn"t warned me to jump, but I found myself glancing in the rearview mirror every few minutes to see if I recognized the car behind us.
"I don"t think we need to worry any more about the idiot who tied that rope across the road," I said, more to myself than to Augusta. "Paddington Bear seems to think it was a local delinquent who"s done this kind of thing before."
"Paddington Bear?" Augusta was concentrating on the traffic in the other lane and didn"t look at me.
"Officer Echols. He said the boy wasn"t in school yesterday, and they haven"t been able to locate him."
The angel spoke softly. "Vigilance, faith, and determination-they will see us through."
"Glad to hear it. Those are powerful words. Who said them?"
"I can"t remember," Augusta said with a perfectly straight face. "But I think it might have been me."
The Esteses lived in a blue Cape Cod with white trim in an older part of Charlotte, and Tess Estes, a plump, graying woman who looked like she should be on the cover of a Mother Goose Mother Goose book, met me at the door. She wore an ap.r.o.n that read, PAYTHECOOK... FORGET THE KISSES! and a smudge of cocoa on her chin. book, met me at the door. She wore an ap.r.o.n that read, PAYTHECOOK... FORGET THE KISSES! and a smudge of cocoa on her chin.
"You"re just in time! Come join us in the kitchen. Coffee"s hot, and I"ve a batch of mola.s.ses cookies ready to come out of the oven."
"It smells wonderful in here!" I trailed happily after her past a living room furnished with overstuffed chintz and velvet Victorian, through a dining room featuring Danish Modern, and into an Early American kitchen, where a child-size old woman sat at a table sprinkling unbaked cookies with red sugar.
"We"re trying to get a head start on our Christmas baking," the lady in the ap.r.o.n said, "and please excuse my poor manners." She stuck out a floury hand. "I"m Tess, and this is Mother Estes, cookie decorator extraordinaire. The pastry chef on that TV cooking show"s been trying to hire her away from me, but I"m not letting her go."
Mamie Estes completed a ginger snowman"s attire with a row of raisin b.u.t.tons and looked up at me with eyes almost as blue as the gingham curtains behind her. She wore no gla.s.ses. "You"re Lucy"s granddaughter." It was more of an announcement than a question.
"Great-granddaughter," I said, and took the hand she offered. It was so tiny and delicate I was afraid I might crush it in my larger, stronger one.
Tess scooped spicy brown cookies from the baking tin and piled them on a blue spatterware plate that she set in front of us. I bit into a nut-encrusted Christmas tree and thought of Augusta, who was looking on, no doubt, with her mouth watering.
"I came to ask you about the Mystic Six," I said to the woman sitting next to me. "I need your help, Mrs. Estes."
A small blue blaze flared in her old eyes, but only for a second. "What kind of help?" she said.
"I need to know about the quilt, what happened to it."
Mamie Estes broke a cookie in two and it crumbled into her lap. "That"s all over and done with. n.o.body left but me."
"I know," I said. "Still, it could be important."
Tess looked at me across the table and her eyes signaled, Don"t go there! Don"t go there!
But what else could I do? "I"m sorry," I said to both of them, "but... well, things have happened that might have been prevented. Bad things." I couldn"t tell her about Otto! What if she dropped dead from the shock of it? However, even in her frail condition, Mamie Estes looked as if she could handle a bombsh.e.l.l or two.
"There"s something about that quilt you made back then that might help us to work through a difficult problem now," I told her.
Mamie looked at her daughter-in-law and slowly shook her head. "What does it matter now? I can"t see the harm-but why? What good would it do?"
She was reluctant to let the old quilt go, and I didn"t blame her. She was the last member and had earned the right to keep it. "If you could just let me see it, that might be enough. I"d understand if you"d rather I not-"
"I don"t have it," Mamie said in a voice that didn"t seem frail at all. "I"d give it to you if I could." She fumbled in the box of cookie cutters until she found one she liked. It was an angel. "I don"t care if I never see the blamed thing again."
"Then who? There"s n.o.body else. You were the last one." I glanced at Tess with what I hoped was a "help me" look, but Tess, upper arms jiggling, thumped dough onto a floured board and rolled it into a plate-size circle.
"Flora had it last." Mamie patted the tabletop with pale twig fingers. "I sent it to her just before she died. We were the last, you see."
"Then it should"ve come to you. Her granddaughter didn"t mail it back?"
She closed her eyes, and I could see I was tiring her, but my guilt was laced with purpose. This woman was my last link to something that happened over seventy-five years ago.
"Didn"t think to ask her. It"s not something I like to remember," she said.
Ignoring Tess"s warning look, I knelt beside Mamie"s chair and spoke as firmly and as evenly as I could. I didn"t want her to miss my meaning. "Mrs. Estes, what is it about that quilt? Why did you pa.s.s it from one to the other?"
Her mouth turned up in a halfway smile. "Hot potato," she said.
I remembered a party game we played as children where we pa.s.sed an object from one to the other until the music stopped. If you were caught holding the "potato," you had to drop out of the circle.
"You mean n.o.body wanted to keep it?" I asked. "It was Annie Rose"s quilt," she said, and began to cut out Christmas angels in the dough. I could see she wasn"t going to tell me any more.
I was surprised to see by the kitchen clock that it was after twelve noon, and apologized for staying so long. "I didn"t mean to intrude on your lunch hour," I said, rising to go. "And I can"t tell you how much I appreciate your taking the time to see me."
"Bosh! We don"t go by a schedule here," Tess said, wiping her hands on a blue-striped dish towel. "We eat what and when we want, don"t we, Mother Estes?"
The old woman grunted something that sounded in the affirmative. "Why don"t you and your friend stay for lunch?" Mamie said to me. "Maybe we can play some bridge."
"My friend?" I glanced at Tess, who shrugged.
"That pretty thing over there! She looks just like an angel." Mamie finished a row of angel cookies and smiled at a point near the kitchen doorway.
I thanked her and stammered excuses, then stooped to kiss her cheek as I said goodbye.
"Guess it"s time to take a break from Christmas baking," Tess whispered as she walked with me to the door. "She"s got angels on the mind!"
"She saw you, didn"t she?" I asked Augusta once we reached the car.
Augusta held up a crisp mola.s.ses Santa and smiled. "Not only that, but she slipped me a cookie!"
"You certainly don"t seem disappointed about the quilt," I said. "Mamie Estes was number six, Augusta. We"ve run out of members. It looks like none of these people knows what happened to it, and I don"t know where else to look."
"What did I tell you about determination?" Augusta said.
"But can"t you see we"ve reached a dead end?"
Augusta"s necklace winked violet-gold-plum in the sunlight as she ran the stones through her fingers. "We"ve only come in a circle, Arminda. Now we have to find out which one isn"t telling the truth."
Chapter Seventeen.
I"m pretty sure I know which one," I said.
Augusta didn"t say anything.
"It has to be Flora"s granddaughter. Remember how she reacted when I mentioned the emblem on Flora"s gravestone? Downright hostile!"
"Peggy O"Connor. She obviously didn"t want to admit her grandmother had any connection to that group. Why, I wonder." Augusta watched traffic whiz past at a busy intersection. "Where do all these people come from? And where are they going in such a hurry?"
"To lunch if they"re lucky," I said. "Want to stop somewhere for a bite?"
Augusta said she wouldn"t mind if we did, so I picked up some pizza to go, and we ate it in a roadside park. It had been sunny and mild when we started out, but now the air had turned brisk, and a chilling wind sent paper napkins tumbling across the gra.s.s. I watched openmouthed as Augusta stood and held out her hand. The napkins did a bobbing little ghost dance and sailed into the nearest trash can.
"I so dislike litter," she said. Then took her time searching for a piece with pepperoni before taking a dainty bite.
"Do you think Mamie"s daughter-in-law, Tess, knows why the quilt was so important?" she asked.
"She seemed to be aware that the subject was disagreeable to Mamie, but she"d seen it, of course, said it looked innocent enough to her. Like folk art, Tess said. I don"t think Mamie talked much about it. Tess said she didn"t remember her ever using it on a bed or anything."
"Then I suppose you"ll have to make another trip to Georgia," Augusta said. "There must be some way to make Flora"s granddaughter realize the seriousness of the situation."
"You mean we we, don"t you? I don"t want to have to face that horrible woman alone. Acts like she has a pole up her a.s.s!"
Augusta let that one pa.s.s with an almost imperceptible twitch of her eyelid. "It might be nice if your cousin kept you company this time. I should think she"d want to know what"s going on. After all, Otto was her kin, too, and he did remember her in his will."
"If you mean Gatlin, I wouldn"t count on it. She"s all wrapped up in her own world right now."
"Do I detect a faint hint of resentment here?" Augusta sipped coffee from a paper cup.
I shrugged. "I know she"s busy and worried about money and the bookshop and all, but she doesn"t seem too curious, either. I hate to drag her into this, Augusta. I haven"t told her about finding the pin. I"m not sure she"d want to know. After all, Otto"s murder might not have had anything to do with the Mystic Six, and Gatlin doesn"t seem to think the quilt is important to what"s been going on."
Augusta gathered up the debris from our lunch and tossed it into the trash. "We"re not absolutely sure that it is," she said, "that"s why it"s necessary to learn just what Annie Rose"s pin was doing on that bathroom floor."
"I think it must"ve fallen out of Otto"s pocket when he pulled out his handkerchief." I said. "The police found a handkerchief in his hand.... But why would Otto be carrying around a pin that belonged to somebody who died before any of us were even born?"
Augusta hurried to the car and wrapped herself in her downy cape until only her face peeked out. "Perhaps you and Gatlin should take time to talk," she suggested.
"About what?"
"Arminda, why don"t you tell me what"s really bothering you?"
"I miss her," I said. No use trying to keep things from Augusta. "Gatlin"s always been there for me, and when Jarvis died she was wonderful. Now she doesn"t seem to have time anymore. I"m lonely, Augusta. I don"t have anybody."
Two sea-blue eyes looked at me over a puff of silvery cloud. The warmth from them zapped me about mid chest.
"I know I have you you, Augusta, but you aren"t here to stay. You said so yourself. One day you"ll leave me, too-just like Jarvis and Mama."
I hated how I sounded. Childish and selfish. And jealous. I was jealous of my own cousin, my best friend, because she had a family to come home to at night and I didn"t. I didn"t like myself at all.
My head began to throb, and Augusta touched it with the tips of her fingers, leaving my temples cool and refreshed. "It"s been a rough few days, Arminda Grace Hobbs, but you"ve endured it well. And I, for one, think you have true grits."
I giggled all the way home The light on my answering machine blinked red at me from the table in the hallway, and I almost knocked over a lamp in my rush to push the PLAY b.u.t.ton. Maybe the police had found out who had meant to send me tumbling off Water Tower Hill, or it could be Vesta calling to say the errant Mildred had returned at last.