Augusta Wainwright was the closest thing we had to royalty in Hopemore, Georgia. Her granddaddy was governor back when she was young, and her brother was a U.S. senator for three terms. She never bragged, but their names cropped up in a lot of conversations. She also never bragged that after Lamar’s death she sold his daddy’s cotton mills for more millions than I have fingers and toes, but she expected us to let newcomers know, so she got due respect. Gusta ascended to the throne of Hopemore within a few days of her birth, and never relinquished it.
“I can’t come right now,” I informed her. “I’ve got to get Joe Riddley settled. Then I have a reporter coming by to interview me for the paper.” I tried to say that casually, but to tell the truth, I was a bit nervous and even a little excited. In the past it was Joe Riddley who got stories in the paper, for winning almost every award in the county. All I’d done was help him run Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery, raise two boys, and serve as treasurer to a lot of clubs. Treasurers don’t get stories in the paper, unless they abscond with funds. Of course, I wrote a monthly gardening column, and my name was sometimes in the paper for helping our ungrateful police chief, Charlie Muggins, solve a murder. But those weren’t stories about
me.
Gusta didn’t say a word about my interview. A bit miffed, I warned, “It will be close to dinnertime before I get there.” For Gusta, as for us, dinner was still eaten at noon.
She sighed. “Well get here as soon as you can. I need you to come talk sense into Meriwether.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t want to mention it over the telephone.” We’ve had private phone lines longer than Meriwether has been alive, but Gusta still thinks somebody might be listening in on her.
When I hung up, Joe Riddley spoke in his new, careful way. “Who was on the phone?”
Joe Riddley was the best-looking man in Hope County, as far as I was concerned—with long, rangy bones from his Scots grandfather and dark hair and eyes and a tinge of copper in his skin from his Cherokee grandmother—and it broke my heart to see him sitting in a wheelchair with a half-there look in his eyes and his cap dangling from one hand. All his life Joe Riddley had worn a succession of red caps with YARBROUGH’S in white letters over the brim. Our boys joked they’d bury their daddy in his cap and me with my pocketbook.
I set my pocketbook on the counter. “Gusta, commanding me to come talk sense into Meriwether. Hang up your hat.”
Joe Riddley carefully centered his cap on its hook beside the kitchen closet. “Meriwether
has
sense,” he said belligerently. Meriwether was one of Joe Riddley’s favorite people. “Meriwether’s going to be all right. You just wait and see.”
He’d been saying that for twelve years, since Meriwether came home from college silent and pale as an ice princess and let out word that her engagement to Jed Blaine was over. When folks have watched you fall in love in preschool and stay in love with a hometown boy all the way through college, they feel they have a right to know more than that, but Meriwether never offered any explanations. Just moved back into her grandmother’s house (where she’d lived since her own mother died in childbirth) and volunteered in charities Gusta thought would fold if Wainwrights didn’t personally oversee them, accompanied Gusta on two or three trips abroad every year, wrote Gusta’s letters, paid her bills, balanced her checkbook, and helped her host small elegant parties several times a year. Joe Riddley and I got Christmas cards from Jed, so we knew when he finished Mercer Law School and joined a practice in Atlanta, but he never came back to Hopemore and Meriwether never, ever mentioned his name.
Clarinda snorted from where she was rolling out the biscuits. “Best sense you can talk to that girl is, tell her to move out of her grandmother’s house and get a
life.
Prince Charming ain’t gonna ride his white charger up Miss Gusta’s steps, and he may not recognize she’s a princess once she gets wrinkles.”
“I’ll tell her you said so.”
Clarinda opened her mouth to say more when we heard tires crunch on our gravel drive and knew the reporter had arrived.
No taller than my five-foot-three and wearing a khaki skirt, yellow cotton sweater, and sandals, she scarcely looked old enough to be out of college. Silky auburn hair swung down her back halfway to her bottom. Only the wire-rimmed glasses perched on her pert nose and the expression in her brown eyes were businesslike. “I’m Kelly Keane”—she held out one slim hand—“from the
Hopemore Statesman.
It’s such a pretty day. Could we talk on your porch?”
Hope County is located in that strip of Middle Georgia between I-20 and I-16, right on the edge of the gnat line, and while nobody knows why gnats come to a certain Georgia latitude and stop, Joe Riddley always said it’s because they know our climate’s the next best thing to heaven. That September day the grass and trees were dark, dark green and an egg yolk sun floated near one startling white cloud in a deep blue sky. As we carried brownies and glasses of tea to our screened side porch, bees buzzed, young birds sassed their parents in the manner of adolescents everywhere, and the air was thick with the scent of our old apple tree.
“This is lovely!” Ms. Keane exclaimed as she took a rocker and looked over our three acres of grass, trees, and flower beds.
“Why, thank you. Our son Ridd does most of the work. He loves to dig in the dirt, and we’re too busy selling plants to have time to fool with them.”
She poised her pen over a pad. “Now, you and Judge Yarbrough—” She turned so fiery red I nearly went for water to put her out.
“That’s all right. People do that all the time. They still think of him as the
real
judge.”
“Are you both lawyers?”
“Oh, no. In Georgia you don’t have to be a lawyer to be a magistrate. The chief magistrate in each county is elected, and she or he appoints the rest. Most of us are part-timers, running our businesses while we serve. The state gives us training every year.”
She checked a list of questions she’d brought. “How long have you all been married?”
“Married, or together?” From her expression, I knew she thought we’d lived in sin before getting hitched, so I hurried to set her straight. “Joe Riddley and I have been married forty-one years, but we’ve known each other nearly sixty. We met when I was four and he was six, when my daddy stopped by his daddy’s hardware store for cotton seed and fertilizer. That’s the same store we now own, Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery. But everybody already knows that.”
“That’s romantic.” She turned a little pink. “I think your husband has physical therapy with a friend of mine. Darren Hernandez?”
“That’s right.” While she consulted her notes, I was thinking I’d have to ask Darren if he’d taken Kelly out. His love life could use some sprucing up—he was pining for a two-timing woman down in Dublin. Kelly lifted her head. “You have two sons, right? Ridd teaches at the high school and Walker owns an insurance company?”
“Yes. They grew up in this house, just like their daddy. He was born upstairs.” When she looked around at the big blue house in astonishment, I surprised her some more. “Joe Riddley is the fourth-generation Yarbrough to live here. His great-granddaddy owned a sawmill and lumber company back before the War. He could afford to build big after General Sherman lit through town and created an unprecedented demand for lumber. The Civil War,” I answered her puzzled look. “Sherman burned the houses.”
“Oh. Well, it’s a gorgeous house.” Then she stepped out of her reporter shoes to ask, “But aren’t you nervous, living way down a dirt road so far from the highway?”
“It’s a gravel road.” I spoke a mite tartly, thinking of the fortune we’d invested in gravel over the years. “And it’s just half a mile. Besides, we’ve got good neighbors.”
She wrinkled her forehead. “Just two other houses, and one of them is empty.”
Considering that one owner of the place on the corner had been a killer and another a kook, empty was a vast improvement. I didn’t want to go into that, however. “We love it down here. It’s very quiet except for crickets, owls, and frogs.”
“Oh.” The way she kept tapping her toe on the floor, quiet wasn’t something she valued. She peered at her questions again. “Did you always want to be a magistrate?”
“Heavens no. I think the main reason they chose me is because I went to magistrate school with Joe Riddley so many times, and have watched him do magistrate business for thirty years in our office. Our son Walker, though, swears the county appointed me so they could save money by recycling the Judge Yarbrough sign on our office door.”
“Could you, uh, tell me something about your husband’s, uh, accident? What happened, and how you, uh, felt?” She had prepared that question ahead of time and was still embarrassed to ask it. Most people were embarrassed to talk about Joe Riddley right then.
“It happened too fast for me to feel anything. Everything changed in less than a minute. One night in August Joe Riddley went down the road looking for our beagle, who’d escaped her pen. A killer thought Joe Riddley was on his trail, and shot him. Luckily Joe Riddley had bent toward Lulu at the time, so the bullet just grazed his head. The same man also shot Lulu.”
1
“You’d never know it.” Across the lawn, Lulu was chasing a butterfly.
I chuckled. “That bullet turned her into the fastest three-legged beagle in Georgia.”
“And your husband?”
How could I tell her that the bullet had turned Joe Riddley into a stranger? One evening I had a husband who was wise, gentle, funny, and occasionally grumpy, but who loved me more than life. When he woke up from his coma, I had a husband who could not read, who could not put words together in coherent sentences, who could not send signals to his legs to make them walk, who erupted in unexpected rages at the slightest thing, and who didn’t even seem to like me most of the time. Sometimes he got so mad at me I was afraid of him.
That’s not what I told Kelly Keane, of course.
“Joe Riddley’s injury is mild compared to many,” I said, quoting his doctor. “He ought to be back to normal eventually.” I didn’t add that “eventually” could seem like a very long time.
She wrote a pretty good article, except she never mentioned Yarbrough’s Feed, Seed and Nursery and she quoted Walker about that dratted sign.
The next time I’d be in the paper would be in October, when Hiram Blaine was found dead in my dining room.
2
As I gathered up my pocketbook to leave, Clarinda asked, “You reckon I ought to hold back your dinner?”
“Gusta didn’t ask me to eat, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Even if she had, you wouldn’t get much. That woman hates to lay out money she doesn’t have to. Speaking of laying out money, did you ever talk to the florist about centerpieces for the judge’s birthday party?”
“No. Ridd says to put a pot of chrysanthemums on each table.”
She rested both hands on her stout hips. “We don’t want to look like we’re advertising the store. Go over to Flowers ’R’ Us and talk to them. They did arrangements for our Sisterhood meeting at church, and they’re real good. Reasonable, too.”
“Maybe I’ll talk to them, then.” We sounded, I thought, like two Old Testament wives planning a birthday party for our joint husband.
I stopped by Joe Riddley’s room, where he was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. “I’m going to see Gusta and Meriwether.” He liked to know exactly where I would be.
He gave me an anxious look and carefully pronounced every syllable. “Is ‘go see Meriwether’ in your log?”
“I don’t have a log, honey. You have the log.” Joe Riddley’s log was a notebook in which we had to write down every blessed thing he needed to do in a day, so he could check on himself. His memory was slowly coming back, but he still couldn’t remember things like “get dressed,” “go to therapy,” “eat dinner.”
I deposited a kiss on his head. “You be good, now, you hear me?”
“I’ll be good or I’ll be careful.” His eyes had the ghost of a twinkle.
It was a good thing I’d lived in that house more than thirty years, because my eyes were so blurred with tears I’d never have found my way to my car. It was real confusing, smack in the middle of all the strange things Joe Riddley’s brain was doing, for a shutter to go up and suddenly give me a glimpse of the man I’d loved all my life. Those were the times that shattered my self-control.
Gusta lives on Oglethorpe, which has three blocks of fine Victorian houses and even three antebellum houses just down from the courthouse square. Gusta’s is one of the antebellums, spared by General Sherman on his comet-trail trip through town—“not by intent,” Gusta insists in her gravelly voice, “but because those Yankees had a hard time getting Georgia heart pine to burn.”
Normally I didn’t mind driving behind gawking tourists, but that morning I was impatient. What could Meriwether be doing to get Gusta in such a tizzy? They’d had some rousing disagreements back when Meriwether was dead set on marrying Jed and Gusta was just as determined no granddaughter of hers would every marry a Blaine. But once Meriwether had come home with a broken heart, the two of them had never disagreed on anything more serious than which author should speak at the Friends of the Library banquet.