The Almost Sisters(61)

If Birchie had been younger, and wholly in her right mind, it might have been a harder decision. But this thing she’d done, years and years ago, it was too late to ask her to pay for it now. The law might not set a statute of limitations on murder, but Justice had missed its window. I set my white hat on a high hall shelf, trading it for a gray one and a long dark cloak. This time Justice had to eat the bill.

Damp-faced but decided, I waited for Wattie, listening through the door as she read about Anne Elliot, with her lost Captain Wentworth and her lost bloom.

Wattie came out at last. She was half asleep on her feet, but she took one look at me and said, “Come on, Sorrow. You need hot tea.”

I should have let her go to bed, but I couldn’t.

“We both could use hot tea, I think,” I said, following her toward the kitchen.

She snorted. “Forget that, honey. After today? I need bourbon.”

That surprised me. Birchie was a Baptist, but she was a rich, white Baptist, which meant she drank sherry at will and champagne at Christmas and kept a bottle of Blanton’s as medicine for shock and head colds. Wattie, a minister’s wife, rarely touched the stuff.

The downstairs was deserted. Rachel and Lavender must already have gone up to their rooms. I got out mugs and honey and the box of Sleepytime tea bags, and Wattie put the kettle on. We didn’t talk again until we were settled side by side in the kitchen nook, holding our steaming cups. Wattie had put a generous slug of the Blanton’s into hers. We both took a sip, and she winced at the taste, reaching for the honey bear. She didn’t seem inclined to speak even then.

I said, “I want to know why.”

She looked surprised. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.

She shrugged, stirring honey into her toddy, and then she set her spoon down and spread her hands, showing me her pale, creased palms, as if to prove that they were empty of answers.

“You have to have an idea. A guess. Something.”

“I could make a thousand guesses, but only Birchie and Jesus know for sure and certain what was in her head, what was in her heart, when she went creeping up on her daddy with that hammer.”

I shuddered at the image, but I soldiered on. “Did Floyd know why, do you think?”

Wattie turned her lips down. “Lord no. That sweet man! He never even knew that chest was in the attic. Not any more than you did.”

“How can you be sure?” I asked.

Wattie looked at me over the rim of her mug like she was sizing me up. She took another slug of doctored tea and answered.

“That first summer they were married? There was a smell in the house. Very faint, you understand, because we had packed that trunk real nice. Lined it with plastic, put in lime. But still, sometimes, through the vents, a little smell would come. That July, Floyd went under the house four times, trying to find whatever possum or skunk had died down there,” Wattie said. She took a large, solemn swallow of her tea. “He didn’t know.”

My brain had caught on one word: “we.”

I asked, “So were you there when she . . . when it happened? Did you see?”

That was not the real question. I was asking how many little old ladies in this house had committed premeditated murder, and she knew it.

“No, baby. It was done when I got here. A bit of time had passed, too. He was cool as icebox pie. I’ll never forget the feel of his skin when we went to shift him. Like waxed leather. He was on the rug on top of his crumpled newspaper. His port glass was on the side table, so it had happened after dinner. She only called me because she couldn’t shift him on her own, and he was starting to stiffen up.”

Wattie sounded so matter-of-fact, so calm and regular, but my eyes felt dry from not blinking. My mouth was dry as well, but I didn’t drink my tea. My throat felt like it had forgotten how to swallow. I had to tell my lungs to breathe, because they had forgotten, too, all my body’s regular business pausing in the wake of these flat words.

They were new for me, but Wattie’d had them in her for sixty years. Maybe she’d long ago come to terms with her part in it. But maybe not, because she picked up her mug and gulped it all down. From the heat of my own mug, I knew that it was still scalding hot. She powered through, even as a fine mist of sweat broke out on her forehead. She set the empty mug aside.

“Drink yours, too. You need the sugar. You’re white as a haint.”

“You happened to come over?” I asked, and then sipped obediently.

She shook her head. “No, no. She called me on the telephone. It was past ten, which was late to be using a party line. That time of night, a phone call meant someone was dead or something was on fire, so she knew I wouldn’t be the only one to pick up on my ring. Her voice was strained, and she said something like, ‘Wattie, can you come over? I need you to help me get Daddy packed.’”

I was so punchy that I snorted and choked a little on my tea.

Wattie didn’t seem to get her own gruesome pun. She patted my back until I stopped coughing, and then she kept right on talking.

“She told me her daddy had some bad business troubles. Ruinous, she said. As soon as his trunk was packed, he was heading for Charleston. It was smart, you know, because it gave the town something to be talking about. The Birch fortune in jeopardy. It made sense that the next few days Birchie would be so pale and jumpy. ‘Already an old maid,’ people said. ‘What’s she going to do now, if her daddy really has lost it all?’ Birch money kept this town alive in a lot of ways. And yet people can’t help but ugly-like a riches-to-rags story, seems to me.”