To my great surprise, I found it, with no trouble. I was beginning to understand the local lingo!
A small, faded sign nailed to a fence post said ALTERATIONS and KNIVES SHARPENED. The winding lane was muddy from melted snow. I gritted my teeth and drove slowly down it to the two-story brick farmhouse nestled at the bottom of a hill.
A flock of Canadian geese who had taken up residence beside a partly frozen pond flapped their wings but didn't seem to be concerned by my presence. There was a general air of seediness to the property, from the white paint flaking off the wood trim of the house to the leaning red barn. A wheelless tractor was suspended on cement blocks next to the house. A scruffy German shepherd sniffed at my tires, then slunk back into the barn.
I knocked on the front door before noticing a handwritten sign saying COME IN. Pushing open the door, I stuck my head in and called out, “Hello… anybody home?”
From somewhere in the back, I heard the whir of a sewing machine. There was no answer to my question, so I went in, closing the door behind me.
There was no entrance hall. I stepped directly into the living room, furnished with the heavy red-plush furniture I associate with the Depression era. An artificial Christmas tree stood in one corner, but it did nothing to brighten the room. A gloomy Jesus looked down at me from several picture frames.
I passed through a dining room, crowded with the kind of enormous, dark oak furniture one would expect to find in El Cid's castle, and followed the sewing machine sound into a large kitchen.
Weezie looked up and nodded. “Have a seat. I'll be finished with this in a jiffy.”
I moved a laundry basket full of clothes off a chair and sat down at the table. A hearty wail erupted from the basket.
“What the…?” I exclaimed.
“It's my granddaughter.” Weezie rose from her sewing and extracted a crying baby from the mound of clothes. “I sit her while my daughter works at the Giant Big-Mart.”
She held the baby and stroked its back until the crying stopped, then gently replaced her in the basket and covered her with a towel. While she was busy with her grandchild, I had plenty of time to look around the kitchen and notice that it was a cheery place, unlike the gloomy front rooms. I found the red and white checked curtains at the windows and the Blue Willow china on the plate rail charming. Less charming was the purple shiner Weezie sported around her left eye.
“What happened to your eye?” I asked.
“Walked into a door.” Her brazen stare dared me to argue with her.
“Sorry to hear that.” She made me think of Mrs. Pof-fenberger, another abused wife. Didn't anybody have decent marriages anymore?
“Let's have a cup a coffee.” Weezie filled two blue and white graniteware mugs from the coffeepot on the stove. “Sugar's on the table. Want milk?”
“Please,” I said.
She took a plastic milk container from the refrigerator, dropped it on the table, and sat down across from me to watch me doctor my coffee.
“I don't often use real milk and sugar. This is a real treat for me,” I said with a smile.
“Don't hold with that artificial stuff. It all causes cancer, you know. You like Christian music?”
“I… guess so. A long time ago when we lived in Okinawa, I sang with a Sunday school chorus. We did
“Lived in Oklahoma, huh? Had a cousin went there once. But I didn't mean classical stuff. I'm talking about
She jumped up and left the room for a minute. When she returned she was carrying a small electronic keyboard. She plugged it into the wall, hit a loud chord that provoked a fresh round of screams from the basket baby, and began to sing in a loud voice, “Neeeee-rer mah God, tuh thee, Neeeee-rer tuh thee…”
With a smile pasted on my face, I listened to what seemed like hundreds of hymns. The baby, thankfully, stopped screaming somewhere in the middle of “What uh fuh-rend we hey-vuh in Jeeee-sus.” The wall clock must have stopped, I decided, or else it was running very slowly because that big hand only showed ten minutes had gone by when I knew several hours must have passed.
When she finally stopped, I applauded. Not too enthusiastically. I didn't want to encourage an encore.
“I get real pleasure out of my God-given talent,” she said.
“And so must your family,” I remarked.
“Jackson don't care much for music.” She unplugged the keyboard and wiped the keys with a towel. “You want something altered?”
“Actually, that's not why I'm here.”
She looked at me suspiciously.
“I've come regarding a letter you wrote to the paper. About the cultural center and shopping mall Bernice wanted to build downtown.”
“What about it?”
“Before we print any letter to the editor, we always verify that the letter actually came from the person who signed it.” That was the truth, but usually a quick phone call took care of the matter.
“I done wrote it. You gonna print it?”
“I'd like to,” I said, “but I have to make sure you aren't trying to profit from it in some way.”
She squirmed in her seat. “I don't catch your drift.”
I took a chance and said, “Everybody knows you and Jackson want to sell your farm to a mall developer. Did you want to stop Bernice because she was a business rival?”
Weezie spluttered. “No way! Besides, our deal's off.”
Sometimes the best way to get information out of people is to say nothing, so I waited.
“It's 'cause of Matavious. He went and sold his farming rights to the Conservation Bank. Now nobody can ever use his place for nothing but farming. The builder backed out of our deal, then… said he had to have both Clopper farms.”
“Why would he have done that? Surely, selling the farm would have been lucrative for him.” She looked blank, so I added, “Would have made him lots of money.”
“They don't need it. He's real rich, you know. Doctors always are. He did it out of spite… he hates my husband.”
“Any particular reason? Boundary disputes or something?”
She shook her head. “Jackson's great-granddaddy fought on the wrong side in the War. Nobody round here lets us forget it. Especially them other Cloppers… they say our side of the family disgraced the family name.”
“The Civil War was a long time ago,” I said. “Do you really think people still hold a grudge over something that happened nearly a hundred and forty years ago?”
“I don't think… I know!”
“Perhaps he did it to preserve the land for future generations,” I pointed out. “Farms around here are getting scarce, with all the new suburbs going in.”
“That's what Oretta said… damn bleeding heart! Excuse my language. She cared more for them animals at the shelter than she did for people.”
Her outburst against Oretta prompted me to ask, “Where were you last night… around one in the morning?”
“Home in bed with my husband, where a decent woman should be.” Her eyes opened wide as she began to grasp what I was hinting. “Are you hinting I burned down her house? If anybody said so, then they're a damn liar. Excuse my language.”
“I haven't heard any such thing, Weezie. But the authorities may be asking questions later, of anyone with a grudge against Oretta. You did know she was murdered, didn't you?”
Weezie's hands fluttered to her face, stifling a shocked whimper.
I moved quickly back to discussing Bernice. “If you weren't going to be involved with a rival mall, why were you so opposed to the downtown development?” I asked.
“I'm a good Christian woman,” she sniffed. “I don't hold with that kind of stuff Bernice was into.”
“What kind of stuff?”
