To Helen Back (18 page)

Shotsie glared through her tears. “I’m tellin’ the truth.”

“You’re trying to save your butt by handing over mine!”

“But you killed him!” Shotsie cried out, and twisted away from Delilah. “You banged the shovel down on his head. I saw you do it!” The tearstained face turned to Helen. “I told Milt I was leaving for town hall, but I doubled back and waited for Delilah. I banged around the garbage cans then hid when he came out. That’s when Delilah smacked him with the shovel, and I cut through a bunch of backyards to get to the meeting.”

“Shut your damned mouth!” Delilah teetered on her high heels. She was shaking like a leaf. “How dare you put this on me when I was the one who lured him out and you did the hitting—”

“Me?”

“Yes, you!”

“It was her idea, all of it,” Shotsie sobbed. “She’s the one who came to me with the scheme, and I was so mad at Miltie for sleeping with that girl that I was willing to do anything so I wouldn’t be left with nothing. I don’t want to work at a truck stop for the rest of my life!”

Helen got to her feet, less concerned for her own safety now than for what Delilah might do to Shotsie. “Mrs. Grone,” she said to one and then to the other, “Mrs. Grone, please, let’s all stop and take a breath, okay?”

“You conniving little worm!” Delilah shoved Shotsie, who stumbled to the floor. “It was your idea to kill Milton! You kept babbling on and on about how good things would be if only Milt were out of the picture.”

“Ladies, please,” Helen tried again.

Shotsie picked herself up from the rug, screaming, “Murderer!”

“Killer!” Delilah yelled right back.

Then they went at each other for real. Delilah grabbed for Shotsie’s hair, and Shotsie for Delilah’s.

Helen she backed away, knowing she’d never pry them apart without getting pulled into the fray. And at her age, she was too old for fisticuffs. Just watching the two Mrs. Grones wrestle made her bones start to ache.

She hurried up the hallway to the safety of the kitchen. From there, she phoned the sheriff, telling him to get to the Grones’ house and fast.

An ear-piercing scream rent the air, and she put a hand to her breast, her heart pounding.

Heavens to Betsy!

She dug around in the pantry and found what she wanted in a cobwebbed corner. Armed with a broom, she swallowed hard and marched toward the caterwauling, wondering if it was any more trouble to break up a human catfight than an honest-to-goodness feline one.

Chapter 33

“S
O, THEY KILLED
him for nothing?” Helen said, squinting at the handwritten codicil to Gerald Grone’s will that she held at arm’s length. She’d had Biddle read her its contents just a minute before, something she would have done herself if she hadn’t left her glasses on the porch with her crossword.

“It appears that way, ma’am.”

“But where was the codicil all this time?” Helen wondered aloud, tapping a finger on the page. “And how on earth did Earnest Fister find it?”

Biddle shifted in his chair. “It seems he discovered it weeks ago. He claims it was stuck in that old desk he’s been using in the chapel. He’d had to force a drawer open when it jammed, and he ending up pulling the whole thing to the floor.” Biddle shrugged. “He knew the significance the moment he read it. He nearly turned it over to the board, but then he realized he had a better use for it.”

Helen sighed. “Blackmailing Milton Grone.”

“Well, it worked. It kept the old man away from his little girl.”

Helen pursed her lips before asking, “So who do you think actually did it, Sheriff? Shotsie or Delilah?”

Biddle scratched his unshaven jaw. “I’m gonna let the county prosecutors sort that one out, Mrs. Evans. I just hope they put ’em in separate cells or else there might not be enough left of either of them to put on the stand.”

Helen smiled thinly. “They’re quite a pair, aren’t they? They nearly got away with murder. If Velma hadn’t spotted them together at the truck spot, we might never have known.”

Biddle cleared his throat. “Um, ma’am—”

“Yes?”

“You know my crack about your having a Miss Marple complex? Well, um, I think I should—”

“No need,” Helen said, waving off his apology. “I’m just grateful that Felicity’s not the one sitting in jail instead of those two.”

Biddle coughed and busied himself with some papers on his desk.

Helen waved the codicil in the air. “Do you imagine this will hold up in court, even against Wet ’n’ Woolly?”

“I already had a talk with Stanley Horn,” Biddle said, leaning back and folding his hands atop his belly. “As long as the same number who witnessed the signing of the formal will witnessed the signing of the codicil, then it has a good chance of being upheld.”

“Oh, heavens,” Helen breathed, and pressed the page between her hands. “I just thought of something.”

“Ma’am?”

“Whatever will happen when Ida Bell gets wind of this? I’d hate to see what she does to the water park people when she finds she’s got a legal leg to stand on.”

“God help them, Mrs. Evans.”

Helen laughed, and Biddle shook his head.

“God help ’em all.”

Chapter 34

The next day . . .

“S
TOP THIS THING!
Stop, I say!”

Ida left Dotty’s side and abandoned the small band of her sign-toting comrades. Without a thought to her own safety, she ran directly in front of the bulldozer rolling through the knee-high grass.

She dug in her boot heels and waved her arms above her head. “Halt this instant!” she shouted against the noisy groan of the engine. “Halt, I say!”

Above the ’dozer’s loud grunts, she heard the horrified shrieks of her friends and closed her eyes, bracing herself for the worst as the huge machine came at her; its clawlike shovel lowered to the ground as it rumbled ever closer.

Expecting to be lifted off her feet, Ida cracked open an eyelid a minute later, when she realized she hadn’t moved and the motor was not groaning but idling.

She peered ahead and held her breath, realizing that only two feet stood between herself and the big yellow machine.

The bulldozer operator jumped down from his perch and stomped up to her. “Move it or I’ll run you over!” he yelled, sticking his face into hers so that she felt his spittle hit her skin. “I’ve got a job to do, you old geezer, and you’re all that’s keeping me from doing it!”

“Over my dead body!” she shouted, crossing her arms over her chest, unwilling to budge even a fraction.

He shrugged, looking her up and down, as if comparing her to some sapling to be uprooted. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“You can’t do this!”

“Says who?”

“Says the law,” she cried happily, shoving her hand into her pants pocket and withdrawing a crumpled piece of paper. It was a cease and desist order Sheriff Biddle had gotten from a county judge, thanks to the recently discovered codicil to Gerald Grone’s will. She shook it under his nose. “Now turn that contraption around posthaste!”

The dozer operator snatched the paper from her, holding it up with filthy gloves. “Is this on the up and up?” he asked, but Ida had dealt with disbelievers before.

“It most certainly is, and so am I,” she assured him with the shrillness of a drill sergeant. “So stand by and watch this old geezer in action.”

She brushed past him and around the lowered shovel, clambering up and behind the ’dozer’s controls without a thought as to the danger. She’d never driven a machine quite like this but figured it wasn’t all that different from the combines and tractors she’d learned to drive once upon a time at her father’s Jerseyville farm. She fumbled with the gears, whooping when the engine went from idling to growling again.

“Wait a minute, lady! Hey, get down from there!”

But Ida had already pulled the gearshift into motion, sending the bulldozer slowly moving forward. The machine rumbled beneath her like a fire breathing dragon, and Ida felt more powerful than she’d ever felt in her life.

She spotted Dotty staring up, wide-eyed, alongside the handful of others, and she puffed out her breast as exhilaration sped the blood through her veins.

“Tally-ho!” she cried, steering the ’dozer toward the Wet ’n’ Woolly billboard, urging it ahead until the sign was knocked flat on the ground, crushed beneath the rubber-covered crawlers to mere smithereens.

Only then did she stop the bulldozer’s rumbling and, throwing back her head, let out a joyful shout; while, high above her in the trees, all the birds began to sing.

Read on for a sneak peek at the next

River Road Mystery

by Susan McBride

MAD AS HELEN

Available July 29th from Witness Impulse!

An Excerpt from

Mad as Helen

Prologue

T
HE MINUTE
M
ATTIE
Oldbridge unlocked the front door and stepped inside the house, she sensed something was wrong.

She set her overnight bag on the foyer floor, looked around, wrinkled up her nose and sniffed.

The scent of Pine Sol from a recent cleaning lingered, as did another smell, one that Mattie couldn’t pinpoint. Or was it only her imagination acting up, like the arthritis in her elbow?

She’d been gone just one evening, after all, spending the night with her nephew’s family in St. Louis. Maybe she was getting dotty in her old age, she decided, so comfy in her own home that she didn’t enjoy being away even for a brief spell.

Still, she felt wary as she walked through the house, pausing in the living room to let her spectacled gaze roam. The Steuben pieces her Harvey—God rest his soul—had given to her that last Christmas, hadn’t she left them on the shelf?

And where were the sterling candlesticks they’d bought in Mexico? She could’ve sworn they’d been on the mantel when she left for the city yesterday at dusk.

She toyed with her wedding band as she headed into the kitchen.

Fingers trembling, she removed the ceramic top from a canister marked
SUGAR.
She peered inside but saw only a lone rubber band and a bit of dust.

She swallowed, and her eyes widened behind her horned rims.

“Oh, no, oh, no,” she murmured as she hurried from one room to the next, discovering objects she’d come to treasure missing from each. Frantically, she groped beneath the clothes that filled the upstairs hamper, pulling out her velvet-lined jewelry box. She opened it up.

Empty.

With a whimper, she put it aside.

That strange sensation she’d felt upon entering the house was more than her mind playing tricks. Someone had been here during the time she’d been gone. Someone had been in this very room, had stood right where she was now.

The idea of it chilled her from her dove-white head to her sensible shoes.

Without another thought, Mattie got the heck out. Her heart slapping hard against her ribs, she ran the few blocks to Sheriff Biddle’s office. Finding him gone, she hurried across the street to the diner where all of River Bend knew he ate every other afternoon.

The crowd of heads turned as she entered. A few friends called out greetings. But Mattie Oldbridge had eyes only for the sheriff. She didn’t notice as the room went quiet. She only saw as Biddle looked up, his lips puckered to greet a lifted soup spoon poised in midair.

“Good God,” she croaked, “Good God, but I’ve been robbed!”

“Robbed?” the crowd echoed.

She nodded and burst into tears.

Biddle dropped his spoon with a clatter, the noise loud against the sudden hush; although the silence was brief enough. Voices rose in a garbled rush. Chairs squeaked, plates rattled, as the diner came suddenly alive and Mattie was surrounded.

“Move aside, please, move aside.”

Parting the gawkers like Moses did the Red Sea, Biddle took Mattie’s arm, and she allowed herself to be led away from the pack, out of the diner, across the street and to his office, where he settled her into a chair in front of his desk.

“You need some water, Mrs. Oldbridge?”

“No,” she tried to say, but the word that emerged seemed little more than a squeak.

“Would you like my handkerchief?”

This, Mattie gratefully accepted, bumping up her glasses to dab at her eyes. She watched him through her tears as he perched on his desk, one leg dangling, revealing a bit of pale skin above a black sock.

“You want to tell me what happened?” he said.

Mattie nodded. “Someone was in my house.”

Biddle cocked his head. “Are you sure, ma’am?”

“Y-Yes,” she stammered, and her eyes filled with tears again. She made a knot of the kerchief with unsteady fingers. “My best things are gone. Someone took them.”

Biddle came off his perch, hiked up his pants below an overlarge belly, and went around his desk to sit down. He pulled out a legal pad and then a pencil, wetting the tip of it with his tongue. “Go on.”

“My candlesticks from Mexico are missing.” Mattie sniffled. “So are my Steuben pieces and a sterling cigarette case.”

Biddle nodded as he wrote.

“He even took the cash I kept in the kitchen.” She sighed absently. “I’ve always put aside a few bills for emergencies ever since Harvey passed.”

“How much?” he asked.

“Oh, several hundred,” she guessed.

Biddle let out a low whistle.

“My jewelry’s gone, too, Sheriff,” she went on, and he glanced up from the paper. “I had it stuffed way down in the bathroom hamper. How did they know?”

Biddle shook his head as he wrote. “I thought I warned you ladies about hiding valuables in the hamper after the break-ins at Mavis White’s and Violet Farley’s.”

Mattie shifted in her chair, clutching the kerchief in her lap. “Well, I’d been putting it there for the past fifteen years, and no one’s stolen so much as a hat pin till now.”

“Any sign of forced entry?”

Mattie closed her eyes to better recall, but eventually shook her head. “The door was locked,” she told him. “And I use those heavy-duty dead bolts you mentioned when you spoke at my bridge club.”

Biddle’s chair squeaked as it released his weight. He stood and slapped on his hat. He had the door open before she’d gotten to her feet. “Let’s go, ma’am,” he told her. “I’d like to take a look for myself.”

By the time Mattie’s favorite soap opera started at two o’clock, Biddle had walked the well-tended plot around the house half a dozen times, had dusted sills and knobs and mantel for fingerprints—leaving Mattie with a mess to clean up—only to scratch his head when he was done.

“Who was it, Sheriff?” she asked before he got in his squad car. “Who took my best things? Who got in through the locks?”

He paused on her porch, his square face grim. “I’d say it’s someone who knew what they were doing, ma’am.”

To which Mattie let out a little sob.