“And I followed the recipe right down to the cup of raisins,” Ruby Bee snapped. “Now what do you aim to do about Lucinda Skaggs?”
I was still sipping coffee to get rid of the painfully tart taste in my mouth. “Decapitation? Force feeding?”
“She never came home,” Estelle said, enunciating slowly so that the less perceptive of us in the PD could follow along. “This spiced rhubarb conserve proves it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “She came home yesterday evening. Buster told me he was driving to Hiana to fetch her, and she did give you the recipe for this vile concoction, didn’t she?”
Ruby Bee glowered at the offending goop, and then at the offending chief of police. “Buster said she copied it down for me, but she didn’t. She may not be the most charitable woman in town, but she did win a blue ribbon and there’s no way on God’s green earth that she sent this recipe to me.”
“Why not?” I asked meekly.
Estelle stuck the card under my nose. “Just take a look for yourself, missy. Where’s the sugar?”
“That’s right,” Ruby Bee said, looming over me like a maternal monolith. “Where’s the sugar?”
This time I was standing on Lottie Estes’s front porch, knocking on her door. A curtain twitched, and shortly thereafter, Lottie opened the door, gave me a crisp smile, and said, “Afternoon, Arly.”
“I wanted to ask you a few questions about your neighbors,” I began. Before I could continue, I was pulled inside, placed on the sofa, and cautioned to stay quiet until the shades were lowered and the curtains were drawn.
“We can’t be too careful,” Lottie whispered as she sat down beside me and patted my knee. “Now, what would you like to know?”
“Is Lucinda Skaggs home?” I asked.
“Why, I believe she is. This morning when I happened to be in my guest bedroom hunting for a pattern, I noticed that the light went on at six and she put out the garbage at exactly six fifteen. At seven thirty, Buster came out and got in his truck, then stopped and went back to the door. Lucinda handed him a card, and he returned to the truck and left, giving me a little wave as he drove by.”
“And you saw her?”
Lottie’s wrinkled cheeks reddened as she took off her bifocals and cleaned them with a tissue that appeared almost magically from her cuff. “I didn’t want them to think I was spying on them, so I did stay behind the sheers. But, yes, I saw Lucinda for a second when she put out the garbage, and I heard her speak quite sternly to her husband when she gave him the card. She said something along the lines of ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed.’ I couldn’t hear Buster’s response, even though I had opened the window just a bit to enjoy the morning breeze.”
I was amazed that she hadn’t used binoculars and a wiretap. I thanked her for her information, but as I started for the door, an unpleasant thought occurred to me. “Two weeks ago,” I said, “did you happen to be hunting for a pattern in the guest bedroom and see Buster carrying a duffel bag or a rolled carpet to his truck?”
“Oh, heavens no,” she said with a nervous laugh. “However, I was doing a bit of dusting one morning when I saw him carry a braided rug into the house.”
I could feel bifocaled eyes on my back as I walked across the yard to the Skaggses’ house. I knocked on the door, then turned around to gaze at the garden. The bushy bean and pea plants were already thick, and the zucchini leaves were broad green fans. The tomato plants, although not yet a foot high, were encased with cylindrical wire cages.
The door opened behind me. Without turning back, I said, “Your garden’s coming along nicely. I suppose Lucinda does a lot of canning in the fall.”
“Tomatoes, beans, beets, turnips, greens, all that,” Buster murmured. “A penny saved, you know...”
“Is a penny earned,” I said, now looking at him. “I thought of another one while I was walking over here. Like to hear it?” He nodded unenthusiastically. “Little strokes fell great oaks.”
“Is there something you wanted, Arly?”
“I’d like to speak to Lucinda about her recipe for spiced rhubarb conserve. Ruby Bee made a batch of it this afternoon, and it was inedible.”
“I can’t imagine that. It won a blue ribbon at the fair.”
I opened the screen door, but he remained in the doorway, his arms folded. “I brought it with me so Lucinda could check it,” I said, showing him the card.
“She’s asleep. She’s real fond of the one about the early bird catching the worm. I’d rather have ham and eggs myself.” He reached out to take the card, but I lowered my hand. “I’ll have her take a look at it in the morning. If there’s something wrong, she can fix it up and I’ll get it back to Ruby Bee.”
“I had a call from the state police,” I said, ignoring his vague attempt to reach the recipe card. “You’ll be delighted to know they’ve located Shelley at a shelter in Farberville.”
“They have?” he said uncertainly. He swallowed several times and licked his lips until they glistened like the surface of the rhubarb goop. “That’s great, Arly. I was really worried about her. So was Lucinda, although she won’t admit it. That was the reason she left the next day to visit her sister in Hiana. I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.”
“You said something interesting when we were discussing where Shelley might have gone,” I continued. “You said Shelley wouldn’t go to Hiana because her mother was there. How would Shelley have known her mother was there?”
He shook his head and gave me a bewildered look, but I wasn’t in the mood to play Lieutenant Columbo and drag the ordeal out until the last commercial.
I held up the card once more and said, “The handwriting matches the list you wrote for me yesterday. You copied the recipe, but omitted the sugar. Lucinda wouldn’t have, since she’s made it often and is a meticulous person. Let’s return to Mr. Franklin’s ‘Little strokes fell great oaks.’ Lucinda might not have cared to be characterized as a tree, but I doubt it took little strokes to fell her. What did it take?”
His face and everything else about him sagged. “She was screaming at Shelley, spitting on her and slapping her. I couldn’t stand it any more. I told her to shut up. She started screaming at me, and I pushed her away from me. She fell, hit her head on the edge of the kitchen table.”
“I don’t think so. When we do an investigation, we’ll determine the details, but it didn’t happen in the kitchen. It happened in Shelley’s room, which is why you took Shelley to Hiana and brought back a braided rug to cover the bloodstains.”
“It was an accident,” a defiant voice said. Shelley joined her father in the doorway, dressed in a dowdy robe. Her head was covered with hair rollers and a scarf; no doubt Lottie was convinced she’d spotted Lucinda for a second at the back door. “I was the one who pushed her, but I didn’t mean for her to hit her head. Or maybe way in the back of my mind, I wanted it to happen.” Although her expression did not change, her eyes filled with tears that began to slink down her cheeks.
Buster put his arm around his daughter. “I pushed her. God knows she’s had it coming for twenty years.”
Shelley looked up at him. “ ‘The heart of the fool is in his mouth.’ ”
“ ‘But the mouth of the wise man is in his heart,’ ” he countered sadly.
“We’ll sort those out later,” I said before we got lost between quotation marks. “Where’s the body?”
Neither answered, but both of them glanced furtively over my shoulder. I studied the neat rows of tomato plants, each ringed with mulch and exuding the promise of a rich red crop later in the summer. I cast around in my mind for a suitable quote, and although my Biblical training was sparse, I found one. “ ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’ ”