Then FAST FORWARD to the reception in the courthouse rotunda. Stevie had gotten there before me and panned over the lace-covered serving table with the silver platters of finger foods, the cutglass punch bowl, the Martha Circle and their helpers—all in readiness before the first guest walked down the row and destroyed the pretty symmetry.
And now, there I am with Frances Tripp, talking, talking every minute. The hugs, the handshakes. Lu Bingham stuffing pecan puffs with one hand and twisting my arm with the other. I found myself smiling all over again.
And there among the dignitaries, guests, and Marthas were Annie Sue, Cindy and Paige, scurrying around to fetch fresh cups of punch and take away the empty ones. How strange to think of all that had happened to those girls in only two weeks!
And look at Herman posing with them, a glass punch cup in one big hand, a plate piled high with cucumber sandwiches in the other. I couldn't bear to think that he might never walk alone again.
Was it possible that his poisoning had been deliberate? The Coffee Pot? Had Bass's leaving—"IF he's left," said the pragmatist—made Ava or Retha flip out?
I sighed, flicked off the VCR and picked up Judge Longmire's assigned readings.
Heliogabalus fell asleep sucking on my finger.
CHAPTER 20
PLUGGING THE HOLES
"A nail set is used to set (meaning to countersink slightly below the surface) the heads of nails in finish carpentry. The purpose of setting is to improve the appearance of the work by concealing the nail heads.... The small surface hole above the head is usually plugged with putty"
It was one of the fastest exhumations I ever heard of. I don't know if it was a combination of Dwight, Terry, and Gordon O'Connor all pushing, but by midmorning on Monday, Ralph McGee had been dug up, relevant tissue samples had been collected, and his body was back under six feet of dirt again out at Centenary Cemetery where most of the best people in Dobbs were buried.
Results of the tests would take a while. As I understand it, proving arsenic's in a body is a fairly simple reactive test; proving it isn't there is a bit more complicated. Still, we were hoping to hear by Wednesday at the latest.
Rumors were flying all over Dobbs, especially since Bo Poole's office had queried Bass Langley's brother in Georgia and the brother said no, he hadn't heard a thing about Bass supposed to be coming home. "He hain't showed up here. Y'all ask Ava where he mought be?"
"Something 'bout that boy makes me think Bass got all the brains in his family," said Dwight as he went off to query the Duprees again.
Wasn't like he had to fight his way through hordes of lunchtime customers, he told me later. The only ones sitting at the Coffee Pot's counter were two out-of-town salesmen, our in-town drunk, and Gordon O'Connor, who was eating the same thing Ralph McGee usually ordered: a rare hamburger all the way and a glass of sweet iced tea.
In most small places, there's always a cousin or a neighbor's elderly sister who'll tell you—for your own good, of course—what folks are whispering behind your back and Dobbs was no different. Retha was red-eyed, Tink seemed bewildered, and Ava acted belligerent when Dwight came in to ask them where else Bass might be, since he wasn't in Georgia, far as they could tell.
"What's the matter, Deputy?" said Ava. "You think we poisoned him, too? You want to look out back in the dumpster?"
"Now, Ava—"
"Mrs. Langley to you, Deputy Bryant," she snapped.
"Now, Ava," said Tink. "No need to get huffy with the customers. What'll you have, Dwight?"
Up until that minute, Dwight says he hadn't really given it much thought as to whether the Coffee Pot actually was the source of the arsenic. He hesitated and saw Gordon O'Connor watching him through those shiny glasses. The epidemiologist picked up the succulent hamburger Retha had made him and bit into it with exaggerated relish.
("Well, he could, couldn't he?" Dwight asked me defensively. "They certainly weren't going to poison somebody from the Health Department.")
"I could sure use some iced tea, thank you, Tink."
"You like it sweet, don't you?"
But that far, Dwight was not prepared to go. He has a flat belly but he patted it anyhow and said he thought he'd better start cutting back on sugar.
"Humph!" said Ava and went outside to wash the windows, the better to glare at the townspeople who hadn't stopped in for their usual morning snacks. * * *
While everyone might've been walking around the Duprees, Paige Byrd was suffering from too much attention. She and her mother had unplugged all the phones and fled to her Aunt Faith's house the night before. Friends and relatives quickly figured it out though, and by noon on Monday, they had crowded into Faith Taylor's house to lend aid and comfort and hear all the titillating details firsthand.
The consensus seemed to be that Paige had done what she had to when she defended her honor and Annie Sue's; and while it was too bad that she'd panicked and run, well, shoot! She was only sixteen, not even over her daddy's death good, and had never said boo to a goose. Who knew if they'd've done any smarter?
Paige stood it as long as she could, then called Annie Sue, who swung by on her way to run a line of 220 wire for a customer's new air-conditioning unit. The customer was an elderly farm woman who, after her husband's early demise, had managed eight acres of tobacco, thirty acres of sweet potatoes, plus the usual corn and soybeans till her sons were old enough to take over the farm.
No big deal, right?
But she thought it was just wonderful the way young women today could do so many things. Imagine being electricians! She was so impressed. And couldn't she just fix them a plate of cookies and a Pepsi? * * *
On Tuesday morning, I awoke to the sound of Mr. Ou's lawn mower. The deep back gardens are overlooked by screened verandas that run the width of the house upstairs and down, and I pushed open my bedroom doors and stepped outside. A lacy screen of clematis shaded my part of the veranda and I looked down onto beds of splashy summer flowers at the height of their colors and riotous beauty.
Aunt Zell has never gone in for exotic plantings. She prefers sturdy common annuals and old-fashioned perennials: zinnias of every color and height from multicolored miniatures to four-foot red giants, clear yellow marigolds, white and pink cosmos, blue salvia, more blue in the speedwell, clumps of old-time daylilies, and stiff purple phlox.
In the middle of the yard, in a long diagonal from the house, is Uncle Ash's lap pool, forty feet long by six feet wide and only four feet deep. A narrow footbridge arches over the center to a weathered gazebo almost hidden in its tangle of purple clematis.
Along the side wall, rhododendrons had finished blooming, but hydrangeas sported deep blue blossom heads bigger than honeydew melons.
Except for a wide swath that meanders through the flowerbeds and strips each side of the lap pool, there isn't much grass here in the back; and one of Mr. Ou's adolescent sons guided the power mower along the path while he and another child weeded and a third boy used an electric edger to trim where the mower couldn't reach. A much younger child gravely lopped off dead flower heads with a pair of hand clippers.
All wore khaki shorts and shirts, brown leather sandals, and cloth hats against the July sun. Mr. Ou himself was so young that I found myself suddenly taking another look at the three older boys. They were quite close in height and build. Too close, in fact, to be brothers unless they were triplets. Perhaps cousins?
In the mad scramble to get out of the refugee camps, Mr. Ou, hardly more than a boy himself, might well have wound up claiming younger brothers or nephews as his own sons. Difficult to imagine all the hardships they must have endured before fetching up here in Colleton County—exiled to a strange land, their future entrusted to strangers.