flying the plane.”
“Oh, girl, you don’t mean you
I nodded, surprised at this failure of the rumor mill.
“I heard it was that young woman that lives in your apartment out there, the gal with all the muscles,” Marva said indignantly.
“Oh, we were both out in the backyard.”
“Did you see the airplane, too?” Mother asked.
I shrugged. “It was just a little ole plane, red and white. I didn’t notice any of the numbers on it.” It would be hard to find someone who knew less about airplanes than I did.
“I can’t believe it, in our little town,” Marva said, forgetting to whisper. “Maybe it was somebody Jack had sent to prison?”
Mother and I shrugged simultaneously, and shook our heads to back the shrug up.
“Well, see what you make of this situation here, and let me know,” Marva said. “I’ve been minding the door for an hour now, but I have to go home soon, I’ve got bread coming out of the oven and I don’t know if Sissy will remember to get it out of the loaf pan after ten minutes’ sitting.”
“Where is Bess?” my mother asked directly, tired of all this hissing by the front door.
“Straight through,” Marva said, nodding her head at the door at the rear of the foyer. “The kids haven’t gotten here yet, but she’s talked to both of them on the phone. They have long drives.” I remembered the Burns children, Jack Junior and Romney, went to different colleges in different states.
“We’ll put our bowls in the refrigerator before we talk to her,” Mother told Marva firmly.
Bess’s kitchen looked just like mine usually did, basically clean but messy around the edges, with bills sticking out of a letter caddy on the wall and an open box of teabags by a pitcher. Another neighbor was working out her helpful impulses by wiping the counter, and we smiled and nodded at each other in a subdued way.
I opened the refrigerator to put in my offering. It was half-full of similar dishes, plastic-wrapped food that people had brought to Bess Burns in her time of trouble, to help feed her surely incoming family. By noon tomorrow, there would be no available shelf space.
Somehow reassured by the correctness of the refrigerator, Mother and I made our way to the den at the back of the house.
Bess was sitting on the couch with two big men flanking her. I’d never seen either man before. They wore suits, and ties, and grim expressions, and as the slim red-haired widow blotted her face with a white handkerchief, they offered her no comfort.
“We’re so sorry,” Mother said, in a perfectly calibrated tone of sympathy calculated not to start the tears again.
“Thank you,” Bess said. Bess’s voice was almost expressionless from exhaustion and shock. The lines across her forehead and from nose to mouth looked deeper, and traces of red lipstick stood out garishly on her pale face. “I appreciate you coming, and Aurora, too,” Bess said with great effort.
I bent awkwardly across the coffee table to give her a hug. Bess, who had only retired at the end of the previous school year, was still wearing her schoolteacher clothes, one of those relaxed cotton knit pants sets with the loose tunic. Hers was blue with a giant red apple on the front. It seemed ludicrously cheerful.
“Do they know why, yet-?” my mother said, as if she had a perfect right to ask.
Bess actually opened her mouth to answer, when the blond man to her right held up a hand to silence her. He stared up at us from behind tortoise-shell-framed glasses.
“It’s still under investigation,” he said heavily.
Mother and I glanced at each other.
Mother was not to be bested on her own territory. “I am Aida Queensland, a neighbor,” she said pointedly. “I don’t believe I’ve met you?”
“I’m John Dryden from Atlanta,” he said, which was an answer that told us nothing.
I didn’t like people being rude to my mother.
“You would be Mr. Pope, then,” I said to the other man, who was darker and younger.
“Pope?” He stared at me curiously. “No. I’m Don O’Riley. From Atlanta.”
Though Mother was trying to give me a censorious face, she was really stifling a smile.
“Bess, why don’t you come with us out to the kitchen?” I said. “Show us what we should put out for you and your friends to eat.” They clearly weren’t friends, and whoever they were, they were upsetting Bess even more than she already was. “It’s so late, and I’m sure you haven’t had a thing.”
“No, I haven’t eaten,” she said, looking as though she liked being talked to directly. Before her two “friends” could stop her, she stood up and circled the coffee table to go to the kitchen with us.
The neighbor who’d been there had left, leaving behind spotless counters and a feeling of goodwill. Bess stood and stared as though she didn’t recognize her own appliances.
“Were they bothering you?” Mother asked.
“They have to, it’s their job,” Bess said, with the weary endurance of a law enforcement wife. “I shouldn’t say anything about this, but Jack knew the identity of a-person-here in town who’s been hidden… well, I better not say anymore. They wonder if it might be related to his being killed.”
“Ah,” said Mother with great significance, which was more than I could think of to say. She turned to fiddle with a dish of spaghetti she’d gotten from the refrigerator, and I saw her eyes close as if she was wondering how in the hell she’d gotten into this kitchen hearing this fascinating but bizarre revelation.
“You saw him fall, Roe,” Bess said directly to me. The air of exhaustion was gone, and in its place was a dreadful intensity. “Was he dead when he fell, or did he die from the impact?”
“I think he was dead when he came out of the plane,” I said, trying not to cry in the face of her pain, since she was keeping her own tears in check. “I don’t think he felt a thing, or ever knew he was falling.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Mrs. Burns, here you are,” said the blond Mr. Dry-den sharply, though he could have had little doubt about Bess’s location. He was tucking his glasses into his breast pocket. Without them, his face looked even more alert. “You have a phone call you need to take in the living room. Ladies, thanks for coming to see Mrs. Burns in her time of grief.”
None of us had heard the phone ring.
“We’ll just set your meal out, and then we’ll leave,” Mother said firmly. “Bess, if you need us, we’ll be
“Thanks so much,” John Dryden said-dryly. And damned if he didn’t stay in the kitchen, watching us get out paper plates (since we couldn’t feature Dryden and O’Riley helping with the dishes) and heat up spaghetti in the built-in microwave. We prepared three plates of spaghetti, Waldorf salad, and green bean casserole, and set the table as best we could, what with having to search for the forks and napkins and glasses.
“Mr. Dryden,” said my mother, as he escorted us to the front door without our having caught another glimpse of Bess, “can you tell us when the funeral will be, and the name of the funeral home? I need to arrange for some flowers.”
“I don’t believe we’re certain at this time about any of that,” Dryden said cautiously. “There has to be an autopsy.”
So Dryden was a stranger to Bess Burns, if not to Jack. Any Lawrenceton native would know the Burns’s burials would be from Jasper Funeral Home, since Jerry Saylor of Saylor’s Funeral Home had divorced Bess Burns’s sister. From the way Mother and I looked at each other, Dryden knew he’d said something significant; you could see him trying to figure it out, abandoning the attempt.
“I suppose the funeral date will be in the obituary in tomorrow’s paper?” my mother persisted.
He looked blank.
“I’m sure it will be,” he said.
We didn’t believe him for a minute.
“Jack Junior and Romney had better get home quick,” my mother said darkly as she slid her elegant legs into her car.
I drove home slowly, more questions in my mind than I’d had when I’d set out.
