Shadow of an Angle (12 page)

Rain was coming down harder by the time I dug out an umbrella from the clutter in my backseat and waved down a caretaker at the bottom of the hill. The Briggs plot, he told me, was against the far wall on the other end of the cemetery. "You might want to take your car," he suggested, wondering, I suppose, why anybody would be wandering around a graveyard on a day like this. I sort of wondered myself.

We found Flora's son Chester and his wife, Julia, buried in the small plot along with the older Briggses. Augusta hesitated at each stone—to say a prayer, I supposed, for the ones who rested there—but she stopped short when she came to the place where Flora lay, then knelt, and ran her fingers over the star-flower emblem there.

"How sad," she whispered. "How very sad."

"What do you mean? Because of the design?"

"That poor child!" Augusta stood looking down at the stone as if she could make the engraving disappear. "To think she still carried this after all those years!"

"Still carried what? What does this have to do with Annie's pin and the Mystic Six?" I could understand loyalty to a group of friends, but this was taking things a bit too far!

Augusta was silent as we walked back to the car. I flapped water from the umbrella, tossed it onto the floor in the back, and slid in beside her. "This all has something to do with Otto's murder, doesn't it?" I asked.

"I had hoped not, but yes, I'm afraid it might."

"Do you think whoever killed him dropped the pin I found, or could it have been Otto himself?"

"Either is possible, I suppose." Augusta unleashed hair that would put the harvest moon to shame and let it fan out to dry behind her. "Arminda, where did you put that pin?"

"In the box where I keep all my other junk—I mean jewelry. It's in my sweater drawer along with those old minutes from the meeting."

"Then I suggest you put it somewhere safe and promise you won't tell anyone you have it. It might have caused one death already. We don't want it bringing about another."

Chapter Twelve

P
eggy O'Connor must have been waiting by the window, because she opened the door before I could ring the bell. Her home on Garden Avenue was a comfortable-looking Georgian set back from the road. A new beige Honda Accord sat in the driveway. Blue pansies nodded from a large urn by the front steps, and a baby's plastic swing hung from the limb of an oak in the yard.

"Cassandra's still sleeping," she whispered. "I was afraid the doorbell might wake her."

If, as her cousin Gordon had said, Peggy Briggs O'Connor was born at about the time her father was killed during World War II, she would have to be in her late fifties. She didn't look it. The woman who invited me in was trim, blond, and smooth-skinned in a green tweed skirt and matching sweater set. The latter appeared to be cashmere, and I wondered if she had changed after getting the baby down for her nap. It seemed much too expensive to chance being anointed with spit-up.

The room I was ushered into was formal but lived in. A child's playthings were scattered about the room, and a gas fire burned on the hearth. My hostess hesitated before sitting. "Can I get you something? Coffee or hot tea? The weather's taken a nasty turn."

I'm sure I must have looked as if I could use some, and I could. I accepted, grateful for the offer. The tea, when it came, was orange spice, accompanied by a couple of homemade gingersnaps, and I was pleased when Peggy joined me. I wondered if she ever made nondescripts.

"There was a recipe in one of my great-grandmother's old cookbooks for a pastry called nondescripts," I said, jumping in with both feet. "It was contributed, I think, by your great-grandmother."

When Peggy smiled, I noticed for the first time the tiny lines around her mouth and eyes. "Goodness, I'd almost forgotten about those! Gram used to make them for her circle meetings once in a while, and I remember how those ladies gobbled them up. I rarely got more than a taste, but I've never had anything like them." She took a dainty sip of tea and broke off a bite of the fairy-size cookie. "All that sugar and cholesterol—it's a wonder they didn't kill us! And Gram said they were a horror to make."

I told her I had heard the same. "Mrs. O'Connor, I think I mentioned an organization my great-grandmother belonged to, and your grandmother, too, I believe. Did she ever say anything about a group called the Mystic Six?"

"Not that I recall." She looked down to smooth an invisible wrinkle in her skirt. I couldn't see her face. "Would you like more tea?"

"No, thank you. I was hoping you might help me learn who the other members were," I said.

"But this was long before you were even born. My grandmother's been gone almost twenty years now. Why, surely none of them could still be alive!" She lifted her cup as if to drink, but there was nothing left in it.

"I thought she might have mentioned it, or even saved some letters. These women made a quilt together—passed it around for years. Vesta, my grandmother, says she never knew what became of it."

"I'm afraid I wouldn't know, either. Gram never spoke of belonging to a group like that. I don't remember her ever going back to Angel Heights. She had no brothers or sisters, and her parents both died in that terrible flu epidemic."

"I just assumed she kept in touch," I said. "Your cousin Gordon told me he and your dad were close friends, that he visited there often."

Peggy O'Connor straightened a brocaded sofa pillow. "My father was killed right after I was born. I never saw him."

"I'm sorry." I could tell she was getting impatient for me to leave, so I gathered my purse and coat to give her the notion my parting was imminent. But I wasn't out the door yet.

"There was a pin, you know. The girls in the Mystic Six wore a small gold pin: a flower with a star in the center."

She started toward the door, then turned to face me, and I had the distinct feeling she had just thrown down a gauntlet. Peggy O'Connor spoke in that calm, controlled voice some teachers use five minutes before the last bell. "That's interesting, but it has nothing to do with my grandmother or with me."

"Then why would that same emblem be engraved on her stone? I just came from the cemetery, Mrs. O'Connor. I saw it there."

She reared back and bristled like a skinny green porcupine. "I can't imagine what you mean by that. That engraving on my grandmother's stone is merely a design, nothing more. It has nothing to do with that group of academy girls you speak of or with Angel Heights."

I felt her hand on my shoulder and knew she was about a sniff away from shoving me out the door.

"Now, if you'll excuse me," she said, "I must go and see to my granddaughter. I hear her waking from her nap."

"Boy, did she ever have her drawers in a wad!" I said to Augusta as we backed out of the driveway. "I'm beginning to have a sneaky little suspicion she was trying to get rid of me."

"Don't be vulgar, Arminda, but you're right. The woman was rude. And clearly not telling the truth."

It was cold in the car, and Augusta bundled herself into her downy wrap and turned up the heat. "I could use a cup of that tea," she added with a hint of a shiver.

"You were there?"

She nodded. "Oh, yes, but of course you didn't see me. I didn't want to intrude."

"Then I suppose you noticed how upset she became when I mentioned the pin?"

"Indeed, I did. And that's not all I noticed," Augusta said. "Peggy O'Connor made a point of saying the engraving on her grandmother's stone had nothing to do with a group of girls from the academy."

"Right," I said. "She made that clear."

"Arminda, you never mentioned the academy.… I believe there's a place up on the left where we can get some tea," my angel pointed out.

"Pluma," my grandmother said.

"Pluma what?" Augusta and I had just walked in after our unrewarding drive to Georgia and back when the phone started to ring, and I could tell from the demanding way it jangled that Vesta was on the other end.

"Pluma Griffin."

The name meant nothing to me, but she sounded as though she meant for me to respond in some way, and so I did. "Who's that?" I asked.

Deep sigh here. "You were asking about the other members of that group my mother belonged to, weren't you? Well, Pluma Griffin was one of them."

"I thought you said you couldn't remember."

"I'm eighty years old," Vesta said, sounding more like forty. "I'm supposed to forget things, Minda. And I probably wouldn't think of it now except that when I was helping Gatlin sort through some of Otto's mess this morning, I ran across an old book she'd given Mama. It was a volume of poetry—one of those maudlin, flowery things people used to weep over, and she'd written an inscription in the front."

"Do you know what happened to her?" I was so excited to hear the news, I almost forgot to be tired.

"Well, she died." Vesta paused, baiting me, I guess, and when I didn't answer, she continued. "Moved away from Angel Heights probably before I was born—worked in a library somewhere in Charlotte, I think. Anyway, when Pluma retired, she came back here to live with a niece."

"The niece—she still here? Do I know her?"

"Don't know how you could forget her," Vesta said. "Martha Kate Hawkins was Hank Smith's receptionist for as long as he practiced. Lives in one of those assisted living places out on Chatham's Pond Road."

"Do you think it's too late—?"

"Don't you dare go there before you come by here and get this book!" Vesta said. "I don't want the old thing, and yet I'd feel guilty throwing it away. Let's shove it off on Martha Kate."

Augusta had put on a Crock-Pot of chicken vegetable chowder before we left that morning, and it smelled almost as good as chocolate. Stomach complaining, I left her up to her elbows in biscuit dough and did as my grandmother commanded.

The slender volume of poetry titled
The Heart Sings a Blessing
was frayed at the edges and bound in a faded blue. On the flyleaf, Pluma Griffin had inscribed in now fading brown ink

For Lucy, I won't forget!

Forever, Pluma

"Forget what?" I wondered aloud.

If Vesta knew, she didn't answer, for just then her doorbell rang, and she went to admit Edna Smith, who tumbled breathless and red-faced into the nearest chair.

"Scared of elevators," she explained to our unspoken question.

"Good grief, Edna, don't tell me you walked up four flights of stairs!" Vesta said, sending me a silent message to bring water.

"I didn't get this winded from sex—'scuse me, Minda," our visitor panted between gulps.

"You know I would've called first, Vesta," Edna said when she was able to breathe normally, "but this just came to me all of a sudden, and I can't talk to just anybody about it." She lowered her voice. "Didn't want to tell you over the phone."

"Do you want me to leave the room?" Oh Lordy, I really,
really
didn't want to hear intimate details of Edna and Hank Smith's love life—or lack of it.

"No, no. You'd better hear this, too, only keep it to yourself—both of you, please." Edna took another swallow of water and leaned forward. "Remember when Mildred got so sick the night of the UMW meeting?"

My grandmother looked like she could use some water, too. "Be hard to forget it," she said.

"I was sitting next to her when later on in the meeting she complained of feeling nauseated," Edna said. "I asked her if she wanted me to take her home, but she said no, she had something in her purse that was supposed to ease it. Looked like those stomach pills you buy over the counter—the ones for acid indigestion—but I can't swear that's what it was. Anyway, she washed one down with coffee."

"Dear God, Edna! Why didn't you tell us this sooner?"

"I guess I just forgot; it seemed like such a harmless thing. Just about everybody takes those things at one time or another."

"Do you know where she got them?" I asked. "Maybe we can trace the pills back to the store where she bought them."

Edna drained her glass and set it aside. "That's just it. Mildred didn't buy the pills. She said Irene Bradshaw gave them to her."

My grandmother frowned. "Since when did Irene become a pharmacist?"

"It didn't seem unusual at the time," Edna said. "Mildred told me she'd mentioned to Irene about feeling kind of sick when she saw her in the grocery store that morning, said she marked it up to stress—you know, with Otto and all. Anyway, a little later Irene came by her place and dropped off those pills, said they did her a world of good. Mildred put them in her purse and forgot about them until her stomach started acting up at the meeting that night."

Vesta didn't say anything for a minute. "Mildred might still have them in her purse. Let's wait and see what they are when she gets back—might turn out to be something totally harmless. Meanwhile, you're right, Edna. I wouldn't mention this to anybody."

"Did Gatlin say anything about Irene's visit to the bookshop yesterday?" I asked Vesta after Edna left. "She had an awful case of the 'wanna knows' about what Gatlin planned to do with Papa's Armchair."

"I can't imagine why." My grandmother slipped off her narrow size-nine shoes and rubbed her feet. "Irene was a good customer, though. Maybe she's afraid Gatlin won't be able to find any more of those out-of-print mysteries she likes."