Joan Hess - Mischief In Maggody

"My leg is fine," Mrs. Jim Bob said, sorry she'd ever brought it up to begin with. "I just mentioned the possibility of bruises, that's all. Why, I'd be offended if anyone suggested your tender hand could cause me pain and suffering."

"Is it too late to pray for salvation?" he said in a hollow voice.

Mrs. Jim Bob glanced at her watch. "Well, actually it is. I've got to run along now, Brother Verber. I'm afraid Arly's already fetched those poor little bastards and will be looking for me." She stood up and gazed down at his bent head. "Why don't you come by the house this evening, Brother Verber? I'll have a nice, fresh pecan pie and a cup of coffee for you. You can be thinking about how I can get around this 'love, honor, and obey' problem."

He gave her a watery smile. "Will you allow me to ease my mind about those bruises I may have inflicted on your knee?"

Mrs. Jim Bob nodded, then hurried down the aisle and out the door before he suggested a "before" and "after" view of the knee in question. Which he seemed to think went all the way to the bottom hem of her girdle. She drove down the highway, turning her head the opposite way as she passed the Emporium since it was owned by a bunch of drug-using, naked devil worshippers, and slowing down as she came to the PD.

Arly's car was gone, which meant she wasn't back with the bastards. At the Kwik-Stoppe-Shoppe, Mrs. Jim Bob parked and went inside to buy several bars of good, old-fashioned lye soap. After a moment of consideration, she told the pimply clerk to put the entire case in the back of her car. She then drove home, went to her bedroom, sat primly on the edge of her twin bed, and unclipped her nylons in order to inspect the damage.

"Well, it wasn't worth fifteen dollars," Estelle concluded tartly. "I'd estimate more like fifteen cents."

Ruby Bee moved the popcorn bowl down the counter to a more convenient location. "So all she did was tell you to keep wearing aquamarine? Except for your beautician's uniform, that's all you wear these days-and no man with a funny accent has stopped you on the street or offered to fly you across the ocean on a jet airplane to Paris, France."

"I don't know what got into Madam Celeste," Estelle said, shaking her head. She tossed a piece of popcorn into her mouth and sucked off the salt. "She kept looking out the window, and she didn't hear half of what I said to her. It got right tedious having to repeat myself over and over, like my tongue was the needle on a scratchy record. In the middle of a description of the man with the accent-she thinks he has a mustache, by the way-but in the middle of this, Mason came in and asked-"

"What kind of mustache? A big handlebar, or one of those pathetic little things that look like they're drawn with an eyebrow pencil?"

Estelle frowned over the bar. "I'll thank you not to interrupt me, Ruby Bee Hanks. I don't happen to know what kind of mustache, because Mason came in and asked Madam Celeste how she felt. She said she was feeling better, but then she upped and told me she had a headache and that the session was over just like that. It was all I could do not to say something, if you know what I mean."

"Not one hint of what kind of mustache?"

"Not one hint; I already told you that. I felt as if I'd been swept out the door like a ball of cat hair. What's more, she had plenty of time for Carol Alice Plummer. I chanced to meet her while I was walking down the road, and she-"

"Who'd you meet?"

"Don't mess with me, Ruby Bee. You can see with your own eyes that I am upset. If you're going to interrupt every single sentence that comes out of my mouth, I'll just go home and talk to the mirror. At least I won't be interrupted all the time."

"I didn't hear to whom you were referring," Ruby Bee said indignantly. "I can't follow your story if I don't know who we're talking about."

"Carol Alice Plummer, if you must know, Mrs. Hard-of-Hearing. You know her-her pa works at the body shop in Starley City, and she's a right cute girl with medium-light ash-blond hair. I seem to recollect she's a cheerleader and keeping company with the Swiggins boy what's on the football team."

Ruby Bee slid the popcorn bowl back within reach, having surreptitiously moved it while she was being yelled at most unfairly. "So Carol Alice came out of Madam Celeste's house just before you got there? Did she have anything to say?"

"I will tell you if you give me half a chance. She was bouncing down the road like her heels were rubber, with a kind of dreamy look on her face. I said good morning in a neighborly voice, intending to ask her if she might want to lighten a few dark streaks in her hair, but she went right past me. You'd of thought I was a ghost!"

"Well, I never," Ruby Bee gasped. "Isn't it a shame the way the young folks are reared these days? You'd think they learned their manners at the hog lot in Hasty."

"Or at Raz Buchanon's knee."

"Or from a carnival huckster with tattoos."

"Or from Robin Buchanon," Estelle contributed, enjoying the exchange. "Or from a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. Or from a-"

Ruby Bee stuck up a finger. "Did I tell you what happened earlier today? It was most puzzling." When Estelle shook her head, Ruby Bee related the confrontation with the puny, vile-mouthed Buchanon child.

"I can't believe he talks like that," Estelle said, tossing off her beer with a snort.

"But the strangest thing is why he was with Arly. She never did say anything about why he was in her custody or what crime he had committed. If you'd heard him, you'd probably guess murder or armed robbery." Ruby Bee took a handful of popcorn and pensively chewed it. "It's outright mysterious, if you ask me. Why on earth would anybody want anything to do with Robin Buchanon's bastards? They're such dirty, nasty things that the social worker crossed them off her clipboard and never mentioned them again. The school wouldn't take them, as sure as I'm standing here. I thank my lucky stars I don't ever have to see any of them again. But I sure would like to know why Arly had that savage with her."

"Why don't you ask her when you see her?"

Ruby Bee had to agree that was likely to be the best plan. She even wondered why she hadn't thought of it first.

The patches of sunlight twitched and flickered as the breeze rippled the oak leaves. Although it was October, the heat had swelled all afternoon and was hot enough to raise a sweat, had anybody been hiking on the north side of the ridge. Nobody was. It was calm and quiet, just the way it's shown in a primary-level picture book. If you listened real hard, you might be able to hear a train way down at the bottom of the hollow. Once the leaves were gone, you might even have a fair chance of seeing a flash of silver or the dull red of the caboose rumbling loyally on the tail end of the train. But except for a hoe and knife, and a rotting gunnysack beside them, there was nothing to prove civilization was right down at the bottom of the mountainside.

You wouldn't have to listen too hard to hear the flies buzzing, though. The big old blue-green ones were the loudest as they danced on the clotted nostrils and crawled on the dried-out lips of the body still lying there, undisturbed by anything except that drawn by instinct to decomposing flesh.

The two eyes could have been glass for all they saw. The mouth, opened in a moment of surprise, was shaped for all eternity to offer the first syllable of a common curse word. The rest of the body had been gnawed by predators, but not so fiercely that you couldn't recognize the various parts of it. One foot lay twisted under a thin wire stretched between two almost invisible metal stakes. There were other wires around the half acre that should have been thick with ginseng but wasn't, and those wires were attached to funny-looking contraptions whose purposes were not at all funny.