Read Angel at Troublesome Creek Online

Authors: Mignon F. Ballard

Angel at Troublesome Creek (22 page)

BOOK: Angel at Troublesome Creek
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Fronie was walking around to the passenger side when I saw the paper in my seat. What was the missing page from my aunt’s cookbook doing on the seat of my car! I snatched it up and stuffed it into my handbag along with the old family Bible Doc had been guarding for me. I wasn’t going to let that handbag out of my sight.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said as Fronie Temple plopped onto the seat beside me. “I told Sam I’d meet him in Albemarle in an hour, so we’ll have to take the quickest route.”
“Then you’d better take the Bethel Church Road. They’re doing construction work on the expressway and the right lane’s closed for miles. Althea Jernigan said she just about wet her pants before she could get to a rest stop the other day.” Fronie strained to get the seat belt around her bulging middle. I sighed and followed her directions, turning onto the two-lane road past Bethel Church. Did Fronie mean to spend the night with her relatives? I hoped so. At least Sam and I would be alone on the return trip. I had promised Doc I’d be at work in the morning, and I knew we’d be late getting home, but I didn’t care.
And if I hadn’t been aggravated with my landlady, I would have been in high spirits, although it had been a demanding morning. We’d seen one frantic pet owner after another until finally, about midmorning, there had been a brief lull. Doc had managed to grab a doughnut and a quick cup of coffee and was on his way to check on a post-op puppy when he stopped halfway across the room and looked at me.
“The glass.” That was all he said, just “The glass.”
I kind of smiled and shook my head. Doc works much too hard. “Yes?” I said.
“That broken window in your kitchen. If it had been broken from the outside, the glass would’ve been in your sink.”
“What?” I stopped to answer the phone, and David Angel, the Baptist minister, came in just then with his pet ferret, and that was the end of that. Now it came back to me.
Beside me Fronie Temple leaned back, closed her eyes, and hummed, sounding sort of like a cat in the mood for more than holding hands. To discourage her, I turned on the car radio just in time to hear the end of the news.
“ … And this just in from Watauga County. The state patrol has discovered a white Honda Civic with a North Carolina license plate that apparently went off the road in the mountains near Blowing Rock. The driver is still trapped inside. Rescue workers are attempting …”
I glanced at Fronie but she didn’t seem to have heard it.
Kent Coffey drove a white Honda Civic.
 
I
looked at the clock on the dashboard. “I’m afraid we’re going to be late. How far is it to the turnoff?”
“A good little ways,” Fronie said. “But I know a short cut just a few miles down the road. It comes out about the same place and doesn’t wind around so much. Might save some time.” She studied herself in the visor mirror and concentrated on centering her funny-looking hat. It looked as if it came straight from the forties.
Augusta had been on my mind all day and I wondered why. Usually I could sense when she might appear, catch a whiff of her strawberry scent, feel reassured by the awareness of her gentle presence, but Augusta wasn’t near. Maybe she had accomplished her mission and moved on to someone who needed her more. But you’d think she’d at least wait to tell me good-bye.
And right now I could use some heavenly direction because I had a dismal feeling we were going the wrong way. “Okay, which way now?” I asked Fronie when we came to the next intersection.
She glanced in both directions. “Right … I think.”
“You think? I thought you knew where we were going. We’ve been wandering around out here for an hour. Sam’s going to think I’ve stood him up.”
But I turned right and drove for another mile or so until I saw the sign. “Miss Fronie, we’re headed back toward Charlotte. This can’t be right! We must be miles out of the way.”
“I’m sorry, Mary George. Guess I told you wrong back there. We should’ve turned left. I sort of got turned around—just wait till you get to be my age, honey. Your mind goes on vacation and forgets to invite you along.”
At this rate I’d probably get to be her age before we reached that barbecue place in Albemarle, I thought as I looked for a place to turn around. I would have to call the restaurant at the next available telephone and tell Sam we were on the way.
But the next available phone was at a gas station—general store about three barns, five cornfields, and fifteen miles down the road, and I had to wait another ten minutes for the woman who was using it to inquire about every one of her eleven grandchildren. I looked at my watch as the woman shifted her handbag and her feet. It was 1:36. If the small store was air-conditioned, it wasn’t working today, and the ceiling fan over the produce stirred only hot air.
I watched flies buzzing around a box of peaches and felt a little weak in the stomach. The English muffin and apple juice I’d had for breakfast seemed like ancient history and I wiped the perspiration from my face with a tissue.
“Honey, your face is as red as those tomatoes,” Fronie said. “For heaven’s sake, go splash some water on it and get yourself a cold drink. Here—what’s that number? I’ll call that barbecue place.” And she planted herself behind the long-winded grandmother, who gave her a withering look.
I really did have to go to the bathroom, and the idea of a cold drink overruled anything else, including my need to speak with Sam—who was probably sitting in an air-conditioned restaurant drinking iced tea. I gave my landlady my credit card and the name of the barbecue place and headed for the back of the store. Sam would wait for me. He would order his sandwich and eat it while waiting for me to join him … and then he would probably order another.
I felt refreshed after washing my face, and took a long gulp of icy Coke before seeking out Fronie. I found her fanning herself beside the car.
“Spoke with the cashier at that restaurant, Mary George. She said your young man’s done left.”
“What? Left for where?” This wasn’t like Sam. “Are you sure? Did he leave a message?”
“Well, he did ask if you’d been there, she said. Maybe he called your place, left a message there.”
Of course! That’s what he would do. I drank the rest of my soft drink and went back inside to phone. Talking Grandma, thank goodness, had bought a basket of homegrown tomatoes and left. I called my apartment twice, thinking I must have dialed the wrong number, but the answering machine never picked up.
“Funny,” I said to Fronie as we got underway, “I don’t remember turning off my machine, but the phone just kept on ringing.”
“I expect you just forgot.” She patted my arm. “And don’t worry, your Sam will understand.” Fronie blotted a fresh layer of purple lipstick. “April Orchid,” she called it, although I’ve never seen orchids that color in April or any other month.
Just then I didn’t much care if Sam understood or not. I was a bit perturbed with Sam Maguire for leaving the way he did. It wouldn’t kill him to wait a little while longer. After all, how did he know I hadn’t had a flat or something? It just wasn’t like him.
And it wasn’t like Delia, either, to go off to lunch with a stranger—even if he did want to buy her house—after seeming so eager to make the trip to Hunters’ Oak. I knew she couldn’t afford to pass up a house sale, but couldn’t she have tried to reschedule the meeting?
If my aunt’s old friend was as concerned for me as I thought she was, Delia Sims certainly wouldn’t want me driving alone all the way to Hunters’ Oak with the coveted family Bible in my handbag.
And a little doom-saying moth flitted inside my head, whispering,
Something’s wrong … something’s wrong … .
According to the map I had bought back at the store, we were a good half hour from Albemarle, and then it would take another twenty minutes or more to get on the interstate and head east toward Raleigh and Rocky Mount. With luck, and if a big rock didn’t fall on me, we just might make Uncle Ben’s by five as Igor had instructed.
The sun was bright and the asphalt road shimmered in the glare. My eyes ached. My head ached. There were too many thoughts in there. Too many doubts. What was that Doc had said? If somebody had broken into my house from the outside, the glass would’ve been in the sink, on the kitchen countertop. But the window had shattered onto the ground below, which must mean someone wanted us to think the prowler got in through the window. Why? It had to be so the police wouldn’t suspect they had let themselves in with a key.
Doc Nichols had a key to my back door so he could get in to take care of Hairy, but I had only given it to him that morning. On the night of the fire, only one other person besides myself had a key to my apartment.
“Mary George, if I don’t get something to eat pretty soon, I’m going to be sick,” Fronie said. “That looks like a right shady place up ahead there. Why don’t you pull off and I’ll fix us a plate of lunch?”
“We don’t have time to stop,” I said. “Just reach back there and grab something from the basket.”
But Fronie grabbed her stomach instead and leaned forward with a horrible groan. “Oh, Lord, you’ve got to stop! I’m sick as a dog! Must be that candy bar I ate back there …” And she made the kind of noise you don’t like to hear when you’ve just washed and vacuumed your car.
I pulled off onto a wide sandy turnaround and Fronie slid out and disappeared behind the large oaks that shaded the area. My hand hesitated over the button that locks the doors. I could leave her here and drive away. I could, and I wanted to. But what if I was wrong? The woman seemed genuinely ill. If something happened to her, I would be responsible.
My handbag with the Bible inside was jammed between my seat and the driver’s side door within reassuring touch, and I felt inside to be sure the Good Book was there. Even though it had never left my side, it was comforting to feel the bulky shape, the worn old cover—and something else. Some kind of paper folded in half.
I’d almost forgotten the page from
Troublesome Creek Cooks
I had found on my seat earlier. Now I drew it out and looked at the recipe once more. I was right. Aunt Caroline had hurriedly circled the recipe for the coffee dessert, and below the directions and list of ingredients was the name of the person who had submitted it. Fronie Temple.
She had the door open before I could snap the lock and drive away. She also had a gun. A revolver. It could’ve been a toy, but it looked like a real one to me, and the barrel was pointed in my direction.
“Just pull on around behind those trees,” Fronie directed. “Wouldn’t want anybody seeing us from the road.” And she stuck that ugly thing right in my face.
With the barrel nudging my ear, I backed and turned down a red dirt trail bordered by blackberry bushes and scrub pine. Overgrown now, probably it had once been used as a field road, and the car bucked and bumped over ruts and stones, limbs squeaked against the sides. Cautiously I crept around a sharp curve, then came to a sudden stop. A large pine had fallen across the road.
“Why are you stopping?” Fronie demanded.
I pointed to the obstacle in front of us. “I can’t go any farther.”
“Then give me the keys and get out.”
From the half-open window came the fresh smell of pine, but the July heat was stifling, and the only thing that moved was the powdery copper dust settling around us. When would they find me here?
Something happened to me then. A cooling spring of calmness welled inside me, and I knew I didn’t want to die. I jerked the keys from the ignition and tossed them out the window, tossed them into the rust-frosted tangle of weeds. I couldn’t fight this crazy woman with a gun, but I could make things tough for the old witch.
And that’s exactly what she looked like with her Halloween hair and her ridiculous striped hat. “Guess you’ll have to hitchhike now,” I said, and waited to meet my Maker.
But I guess my Maker wasn’t receiving visitors because nothing happened. Tossing her hat onto the seat behind her, Fronie opened her door and tramped around to mine. “Get out!” she said. “Get out and find them. You’ll crawl around on your hands and knees until you do, Miss High and Mighty.” And she wrenched open my door and prodded my shoulder with the gun. The gun gave Fronie power and she liked that. She could make me do what she wanted, but she couldn’t control how I did it, or what I said. Fronie Temple needed me. For now.
“You killed Aunt Caroline,” I said. And I knew it was true. She didn’t deny it. “All along,” I said, “you’ve been after this Bible. My Bible. Why? What possible use is it to you?”
Fronie leaned against the car and smiled. “I told you I had relatives in Hunters’ Oak—
relative
, that is. Your long-lost great-uncle Benjamin was my husband’s uncle too—my first husband, Fain. He and your father were first cousins. Fain died before I came here, before I married Braswell Temple, but he’s closer kin to the old man than you are. As his widow, I’m entitled to inherit what would’ve come to him.”
With one hand Fronie wiped the moisture from her brow, and with the other she waved the gun in my direction, all the time keeping distance between us. “Hurry up—look over there—in those weeds yonder!”
I dropped to my knees, but I wasn’t looking for the keys, I was looking for a rock, a sharp stick, anything I could use as a weapon against her. If what she said was true, Fain Murphy must have descended from the third son, Ben’s brother Horace. Fain was the cousin who died in Korea.
“Does Uncle Ben know about you?” I asked, pretending to search the grass.
“Of course he does. I was over there not too long ago, took him a loaf of my apple-broccoli bread. Fain was his father’s only surviving child, you know, and his uncle was fond of him in his way.” She slapped at a mosquito. “I like to think he’s fond of me as well. I’m sure he means to remember me in his will—after all, who else does he have to leave it to?”
Well, there was me, but in my present situation, I sort of hated to remind her.
All those years the family Bible had sat on the bookshelf in Aunt Caroline’s living room and nobody paid a bit of attention to it. “Why now?” I asked. “Have you always known who I was?”
“Never even thought of it until I mentioned to Caroline once that my first husband came from Hunters’ Oak and she said your people had lived there too. Since they had the same last name, I suggested maybe they were related. That’s when Caroline told me about the Bible. ‘We could look it up,’ she said. But we never did. That was twelve or thirteen years ago, soon after I came here.
“Besides, I got the notion the wonderful Miss Caroline would just as soon not have family connections with the likes of me!” Fronie sniffed. “Anyway, I forgot all about it, and so did she, I reckon, until that article came out in the paper about Ben.”
The woman moved closer to stand over me, her footsteps sounded like a death rattle in the dry grass. “I don’t think you’re trying, Mary George, I really don’t.” She drew a wide circle with her foot. “Scrape up all the leaves here, pine needles too. They’ve got to be here somewhere. I’ll wait.” And she made herself comfortable in the shade of a hickory tree. I knew it was a hickory tree because I kept finding last year’s squirrel-chewed nut shells. If I had a rubber band I could shoot them at her like David did to Goliath—only I’d probably miss. But when Fronie wasn’t looking, I scooped a palmful of sandy soil into the pocket of my skirt.
“If your aunt hadn’t become so suspicious, she’d be alive today,” Fronie said, fanning herself with a small branch of leaves. “She showed me that Bible, don’t you know, right after she came across it last spring. Forgot all about my Fain being kin too, and naturally I didn’t mention it.
BOOK: Angel at Troublesome Creek
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