Sadie-in-Waiting Read online

  “Me, too. How could anyone filled to the eyeballs with orneriness look so innocent and adorable wearing an army camouflage shirt, red pants, blue suspenders with silver stars and a foam Statue of Liberty hat?”

  “Got to admit it, sugar, the man has style. Just reeks of it.”

  “Yeah, well at least for now he’s reeking over at April’s, where I don’t have to get wind of it.”

  “How’s that going?”

  “Who knows?” Sadie shrugged and the cookies shifted forward. Gently she tilted the box to set them right again, sighing. “Neither April nor Daddy has said a word.”

  “Then they must not have any complaints.”

  “Well, if April did have a complaint, I don’t think for one minute she’d tell me. You remember when we were growing up how Daddy picked out admonitions from the Bible for each of us girls?”

  “Wait on the Lord, Sadie-girl. Wait on the Lord.” Having heard that booming through the household over the years, Mary Tate could do a better-than-passing fair imitation of Moonie’s simplified counsel.

  “For April it was ‘gird your loins.’ The single most closed-off, cautious human being I have ever known, and Daddy spent her childhood reminding her to always stay on guard.”

  After half a block, Sadie’s friend made an obvious show of looking dead ahead toward good old Pickett’s on the Point and asking, “So did you forgive Ed yet for the great facial fiasco?”

  “Forgave and forgot, what else could I do?”

  “Pout and punish?” She flexed her wrist and wriggled her fingers to set her jewelry sparkling. “Always worked for me.”

  “Put your hand down. You forget who went with you when you bought most of that stuff?” She pointed to herself.

  Her friend tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear, her eyes sparkling to rival the diamonds she’d just flashed. “You know I talk big. Just my way of, you know, keeping my spirits up. No harm intended.”

  “But…?” There was more. With Mary Tate there was always more.

  “I still say you can’t let Ed get off scot-free. You did catch him alone with a very attractive younger woman. If nothing else, he is guilty of using very bad judgment.”

  “If wives started punishing husbands every time they used bad judgment, or caused hurt feelings through carelessness, or took their wives for granted while spending too much time on other things, well, then…”

  “Well, then maybe men would start acting better, ever think of that?”

  “Hmm, seems like I recall someone around here just confessing they were nothing but a big talker. I don’t see you trying to ride roughshod over Royal the way you suggest I do Ed.”

  She wrinkled her nose sheepishly. “I was hoping you’d go first, so I could see how it worked out.”

  “No, Mary Tate. Wives bullying husbands is not biblical. It’s not wise. And it’s not going to happen, okay?”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Besides, I’m too old now to start trying new tricks on poor Ed just because he acted like some clueless kid.”

  “Clueless? You sure? Carmen is awful pretty, and you know her nickname at her corporate office?”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Go-Go Gomez.”

  Sadie frowned. She could have lived a lifetime without having that wedged into the tangled knots of her thoughts and emotions.

  “On account of she’s such a go-getter,” Mary Tate went on.

  “Ed says she’s a live wire. And no, I am not worried one bit about that.” All right, she was a little worried. The statistics regarding fidelity, even among people of faith, were scary. But not half as scary as having your best friend plant ideas in your mind that had no business being there. “And I won’t have you read anything into it, either.”

  “You’re right. Right. Not my place to speculate. I’m sorry. You know me, not satisfied to accept the boring truth when something much more interesting might fit, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Of course,” Mary Tate singsonged softly as they turned the corner. “It could have been much worse.”

  “Oh, it’s worse all right. Much, much worse.” She played up her friend’s insinuation with a shake of her head, then broke into a wry smile. “The man now struts around the house puffed up as a peacock because he thinks I think I caught him on the verge of committing an indiscretion when it hadn’t even crossed his mind.”

  Mary Tate groaned. “Putting you in the most dreaded of all marital situations.”

  “Right. In the wrong.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I know. I know. He just doesn’t get it.”

  “If he were my husband, he wouldn’t be getting it—not for a long time, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I’m going to get you, Mary Tate. Get you some help.”

  “Oh, please do, sugar. I’ve needed help a very long time now—hopefully in the form of a couple of buff, beautiful cabana boys from a culture where they venerate older women.”

  “What for? You’re married.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not dead.”

  They stopped at the light.

  Sadie shot Mary Tate the finely honed “Don’t make me climb out of my comfort zone to drag you back to the straight and narrow because I’m the mama and you will not prevail with me” look that only a mother of teenagers could rightfully pull off.

  “Oh, sugar, I’m teasing. You know no man alive holds a candle to my Royal.”

  “Holding a candle to Royal?” They hurried across the quiet street. “Isn’t that your job?”

  “You bet. Something needs doing, I just hold that man’s feet to the flame and it gets done ASAP.” Mary Tate laughed, gave the wagon a jerk, and struggled to try to hoist it over the curb.

  “Sap being the operative word?” Sadie muttered under her breath, bending down to lift the back of the wagon and help out her friend.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” In fifteen years she couldn’t recall ever having seen Royal do anything for his wife that his wife could do for herself. And since Mary Tate could do practically anything…“Can you get the wagon from here on out?”

  “Got it. Let’s go. Looks like Lollie and Waynetta beat us here.” She waved to the women standing in the shade of the park’s lone surviving oak tree.

  Though the official roster listed nearly twenty members of the council mission statement: To unite churches and community through fellowship and service—Sadie had never attended a meeting with more than a dozen women present.

  She expected far fewer than that tonight, and had not really planned a highly organized or particularly coherent agenda.

  So it stood to reason that the first two to arrive would be the town’s self-appointed social maven and the best-intentioned busybody in the county.

  “Hi, Mrs. Muldoon, Mrs. Cummins! Hope y’all haven’t waited long.” Sadie gritted her teeth and prayed she had not just said “y’all” in front of Waynetta Cummins. She had, of course, and a lecture on “People judge us by our words” surely would follow.

  To avoid that and the inevitable looking like a child in front of people she had come to preside over, Sadie slapped on her biggest slopping-sugar expression and settled the cookies on the picnic table. “Please do excuse me a minute, won’t you? I have to run into my office and sign the group in as using the park this evening.”

  Sadie bowed. She bowed. Or maybe it was more of a curtsy. Anyway, her body bobbed up and down, she flung her hands out and stepped backward, all with her teeth bared in a smile that had to have resembled something between the maniacal grimace of a black-and-white movie vamp and the glaring high-beam smile of a game-show spokesmodel.

  “Isn’t she too cute?” Mary Tate hugged Lollie and nodded to Waynetta. “My office. Two whole weeks on the job, and already she talks like a bona fide career woman.”

  If the other women had an opinion about anything from her cuteness to her career, Sadie missed it. She’d already hightailed it away from
there, as fast as her stubby little middle-aged legs could carry her.

  Chapter Seven

  “You’d better get back out there, sugar.” Mary Tate bounded into Sadie’s office with a cookie in one hand and a can of soda in the other. “Deborah Danes just swooped down on the group with an idea for our fall service project. She outlined it, made color computer printouts and stuffed them in little plastic page protectors for each of us. ’Course, you know how that went over with Waynetta and Lollie! We may have on our hands the very first all-female ultimate-fighting wrasslin’ match in the history of the Council of Christian Women.”

  Sadie looked up from her desk and put one hand to her suddenly throbbing temple. “And how is running in here to tell me that going to stop it?”

  “Stop it? Honey, I think you owe it to yourself to get out there and watch!”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” She flipped up one corner of the calendar that all but covered the top of her battered old desk.

  “In a minute you might have missed it all. What’s taking so long in here, anyway?”

  “I can’t find the paperwork.”

  “Look for it later, girl. You have three queen bees circling the hive out there and the end result will not be sweetness and honey.”

  “You don’t understand. I thought for sure I’d left the Private Use of Public Property form right here.” Paper whispered over paper in her in-box. She stepped back and opened her top drawer. “And now it’s nowhere to be found. Tell me I’m not that careless, Mary Tate, or worse, so distracted or so…so…so old that I’ve become completely unaware of where I’m putting things.”

  “Old? Take that back! You’re younger than I am.”

  “Two months.”

  “My December to your February, honey, it gives us entirely different birth years.”

  “Can we deal with your vanity crisis later? This really troubles me.”

  “Okay, calm down. I’ll help you look.” Mary Tate set her drink down, then held the cookie by one edge in her teeth and stood on tiptoe to peer over the bookcase on the far side of the tiny, dark-paneled office. Muffled by the cookie in her mouth, she asked, “What’s it look like?”

  “Nothing fancy. White paper, lots of blank lines to write names and times, on a brown clipboard with a red pencil on a string tied to the clasp.”

  Mary Tate rested her cookie on top of the old metal file cabinet in the corner. “Did you check in here?”

  Before Sadie could tell her not to bother, she yanked at the handle of the top drawer. The squeaky wheels clattered along their runners and then clanked to a stop.

  Sadie’s pulse picked up. ”How did you unlock that?”

  “Unlock? It wasn’t locked in the first place.”

  “It most certainly was. I double-checked it before I left this afternoon because…” She held her breath, glanced around the room, then exhaled and shut her eyes. “Okay, this may sound nuts, but at least three times since my first day on the job I’ve found things not quite right around here.”

  “Not quite right?”

  “Amiss.”

  “A Miss what?”

  She massaged her temple again even though it didn’t produce any more of a satisfying response than talking to Mary Tate. “Messed up. Vanished. Out of place.”

  “Ooo-wee-oo. Strange happenings at the graveyard.” She nibbled her cookie again, probably to hide the mischief in her grin as she teased, “Think it’s the work of restless spirits?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, Mary Tate.”

  “What about some other kind of restless spirit? You believe in your daddy, don’t you?”

  “Why would Daddy—” She stopped herself, knowing that with Moonie involved one never asked “Why?” Instead, she shook her head and said simply, “‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’”

  “You trying to ask why someone as full of life as Moonie would do mischief in a graveyard?”

  “No. It wouldn’t hurt you to open a Bible a little more often, you know that, girl? That’s what the angel said when they came to look for the body of Jesus in the empty tomb. ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ It’s what Daddy always says about going to funerals and visiting grave sites.”

  “Funerals and grave sites are for the living, to help us deal with our grief.” Mary Tate folded her arms, clearly not getting all the pieces to fit in her mind.

  “I’m just saying, that for once in my life, the things gone totally wacko around me absolutely cannot be the work of Moonie Shelnutt. He doesn’t do cemeteries, and he doesn’t have any plans to until he’s brought to one feet-first.”

  “Okay, if you’ve ruled out the occult and the obvious, what’s left?”

  “Overactive imagination, according to the chief of police.” She picked up the phone and stared at the black bulky thing.

  “Is that who you’re calling?”

  “No.” Her fingers hovered for a moment over the numbers before she began to slowly punch them in. “I think maybe this time I’ll try Kurt Muldoon.”

  “Breaking and entering on city property? That’s police business, not the sheriff’s.”

  “Yeah, but…” She chewed her lower lip, and aware of the quiet ringing in her ear, met her friend’s gaze and whispered, “I can’t call the police.”

  Mary Tate’s eyes grew wide, her tone went hushed as one suddenly sucked into a potentially sinister mystery. “Why not?”

  “Because…” Sadie straightened up and held the mouthpiece down so when the night dispatcher picked up he wouldn’t hear her. “Because I’ve called them three times in two weeks, and every time they’ve come up with a perfectly logical explanation for whatever I reported. The chief of police has taken great pains to remind me that they do not have a large staff and time spent making like Scooby Doo out at the graveyard means time away from serious police work.”

  “Serious police work? Yes, Wileyville is a regular hotbed of crime. I’d wager that man has had to cut his coffee drinking time at Owt’s down to only two hours a day.”

  The dispatcher in the sheriff’s office answered. Sadie held one finger up to signal to Mary Tate to wait. In as few words as possible she explained who and where she was and why she needed to get in touch with Kurt. When the dispatcher put her on hold to see if the sheriff had left for the day, Sadie picked up the conversation where she and Mary Tate had left it. “It’s his tone, you know, that pat-you-on-the-head, ‘there, there, little lady don’t worry your pretty self’ way of his that made me want to just get right in his smug old face and say…Eeep!”

  Sadie slammed the receiver into its cradle and practically leaped backward.

  “Sadie, honey, what is it?” Mary Tate reached her side in two steps.

  Just that fast the phone began to ring.

  Sadie groaned and dug her fingers into her aching scalp.

  “Are you going to answer that?”

  “No!” She waved her friend away. “When the dispatcher couldn’t find Kurt, he said it didn’t sound like their jurisdiction, so he put me through to the police. That’s got to be them calling me now just to give me grief.”

  “Okay, if you don’t want to answer that, how about going outside, where your other duty calls?”

  Sadie groaned, letting her head fall back. In doing so she caught a glimpse of the clock. “We have a full five more minutes before the meeting officially starts.”

  “But Deborah, not to mention Waynetta…”

  “Circle this day on your calendar, pal. A new day has dawned for the council. As of today, that meeting will begin not when the bossiest woman shows up but when the president, me, calls the assembly to order.”

  “That will be different. And good for you for initiating it.” Mary Tate gave her friend a hug.

  Sadie patted her friend’s hand and wondered how long she could keep up the brave face when what she really wanted to do was go home and hide under the covers. Aside from the odd and the unexplained incidents around her office, these two
weeks had certainly taken their toll.

  She was tired. But for once it was a good tired.

  She was stressed. But at least she knew the source of that stress.

  She was resolute. Though she did not have all the answers she needed to carry out her mission, for the first time in a long while, she had a mission to focus her energy on, if only…

  She took a moment, thinking at long last the time might have come for her to utter a brief but heartfelt prayer for help. But before she could even begin to think of what to say, a gentle tapping on the office door demanded her attention.

  “Yes?” she called out, already moving around Mary Tate toward the door.

  It swung open. A man dressed in the familiar uniform of the Wileyville police poked his head in the office. Though she didn’t recognize him, he obviously knew her by reputation.

  “’Lo, Mrs. Pickett, I knocked because I know how skittish you can get.”

  “If you came over to tease me, Officer—”

  “No. No, ma’am. No such thing.” He stood fully in the open door and extended his burly arm outward. “I came by to confirm your qualms about all them suspicious goings-on ’round here.”

  She did not like the sound of that. Not one bit.

  And when she edged carefully around the desk, over to the threshold and peeked out at the once-serene park, she did not like the sight of it any better.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she murmured.

  “I thought you said he didn’t ‘do’ cemeteries.” Mary Tate raised her fist in the air. “Wooo! Go, Moonie, go!”

  The officer laughed.

  The phone rang again, and Sadie figured it was someone calling to tell her what they had just witnessed.

  “Looks like we may have got straight to the root of all that monkey business around here that you keep phoning the station about, Mrs. Pickett.”

  Sadie covered her eyes with one hand. However, that could not blot the scene from her mind.

  With the council members Sadie had just promised she would take in hand looking on, mouths agape, her father made his entrance. Foam Statue of Liberty hat flopping proudly on his silvery head, he grinned and waved, then pointed to the pile of luggage strapped behind him as he turned into the vivid green grass of the park, sitting astride April’s shiny red riding lawn mower.