Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

The Maggody Files: Spiced Rhubarb by Joan Hess

“I haven’t seen Lucinda Skaggs since a week ago Tuesday,” Lottie Estes mentioned to a friend in the teachers’ lounge. The fourth period bell precluded further analysis. Although it was of no botanical significance, the next morning it was discussed at the garden club meeting. It took several hours to reach the Emporium Hardware Store, but then the pace picked up and by mid-afternoon it was one of the topics at Suds of Fun Launderette next to the supermarket, in the supermarket proper, and even at the Dairee Dee-Lishus (although the teenagers moved on to more intriguing topics, such as blankets alongside Boone Creek and which minors had been caught in possession of what illegal substances).

Thus the tidbit — not a rumor, mind you — crept up the road, moving as slowly and clumsily as a three-legged dog on a frozen pond, until it reached Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill. This is hardly worthy of mention (nor was the fact that Lottie had not seen Lucinda Skaggs since a week ago Tuesday, but for some reason it was being mentioned a lot), since Ruby Bee’s Bar & Grill was the ultimate depository of all gossip, trivial or boggling or outright scandalous, within the city limits of Maggody, Arkansas (pop. 755). Despite occasional attempted coups, it was acknowledged by almost everybody that the proprietress, Ruby Bee Hanks, was the guardian of the grapevine.

“So?” Estelle Oppers responded when she was presented with the tidbit. She took a pretzel from the basket on the bar, studied it for excessive salt, and popped it into her mouth.

“So I don’t know,” said Ruby Bee. “I was just repeating it, for pity’s sake.”

“Has Lucinda Skaggs disappeared, or has Lottie lost her bifocals?”

“All I know is that Lucinda hasn’t been seen in nearly two weeks now.” In retaliation for the skeptical reception, Ruby Bee pretended to polish the metal napkin holder while surreptitiously inching the pretzels out of Estelle’s reach. “Lottie said you can set your watch by Lucinda’s comings and goings. She’s real big on ‘early to bed, early to rise,’ and Lottie says not one morning goes by that Lucinda doesn’t snap on the kitchen light at six sharp, put out the garbage at six fifteen, and—”

Estelle recaptured the pretzels. “I’m not interested in Lucinda Skaggs’s schedule, and I’m a mite surprised Lottie and certain other people, present company included, find it so fascinating. If you’re so dadburned worried about Lucinda — and I don’t know why you should be, what with her being so holier-than-thou and more than willing to cast the first stone — why don’t you call her and ask her if she’s had a touch of the stomach flu?”

“I might just do that,” Ruby Bee muttered, wishing she’d thought of it herself but not about to admit it. “When I get around to it, anyway.”

She went into the kitchen and stayed there for a good five minutes, rattling pots and pans and banging cabinet doors so Estelle would know she was way too busy to fool with calling folks on the telephone to inquire about their health. When she returned, the stool at the end of the bar was unoccupied, which was what she’d been hoping for, so she hunted up the telephone number and dialed it.

“Buster,” she began real nicely, “this is Ruby Bee Hanks over at the bar and grill. I was wondering if I might speak to Lucinda about a recipe?”

Estelle pranced out of the ladies’ room and slid onto the bar stool. She waited with a smirky look on her face until Ruby Bee hung up the receiver. “Glad you found time in your busy schedule to call over at the Skaggses’ house. What’d she say?”

“I didn’t talk to her. Buster says she’s gone to visit her sister up in Hiana.” She hesitated, frowning. “I seem to recollect Lucinda telling me that her sister was doing so poorly they had no choice but to put her in a nursing home in Springfield.”

“Maybe she’s back home now.”

Ruby Bee tapped her temple with her forefinger. “It was a case of her being able to hide her own Easter eggs, if you know what I mean. Lucinda was real upset about it, but there wasn’t any way her sister could take care of herself. ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ Lucinda said to me awhile back at the supermarket, over in the produce section, ‘but all my sister’s helping herself to is costume jewelry at the five and dime when she thinks nobody’s watching.’ Why would Buster lie about it?”

“He’s most likely confused,” Estelle said, yawning so hard her beehive hairdo almost wobbled, but not quite. “She could have gone to visit her sister in the nursing home, or she had to see to some family business in Hiana, or—”

“I don’t think so,” said Ruby Bee. She picked up the damp dishrag and began to wipe the counter, drawing glittery swaths that caught the pastel light from the neon signs on the wall behind her.

I stared at my mother, who, among other things, is the infamous Ruby Bee. The other things include being a dedicated and undeniably adept meddler, an incurable gossip, and a critic of my hair, my clothes, my face, and my life in general. I’ll admit my hair was in a no-nonsense bun, my pants were baggy, my use of makeup was minimal, and my life was as exciting as molded gelatin salad, but I didn’t need to hear about it on a daily basis.

I took a gulp of iced tea and said, “You want me to arrest Buster Skaggs because you couldn’t get Lucinda’s recipe for spiced rhubarb conserve? Doesn’t that seem a little extreme — even to you?”

“I didn’t say to arrest him,” Ruby Bee said. “I said to question him, that’s all.”

“He probably doesn’t know her recipe. Why don’t you wheedle it out of the chef herself?”

Ruby Bee sniffed as if I were a stalk of ragweed polluting the barroom. “I would, Miss Smart Mouth, but no one’s laid eyes on Lucinda for a good two weeks, and when I called and asked to speak to her, Buster had the audacity to say she was visiting her sister in Hiana.”

“Oh,” I said wisely. “How about a grilled cheese sandwich and a refill on the tea?”

“I wish you’d stop worrying about your stomach and listen to me,” Ruby Bee said in her unfriendliest voice. “You are the chief of police, aren’t you? It seems to me you’d be a little bit worried when someone ups and disappears like this, but all you care about is feeding your face and hiding out in that filthy little apartment of yours. That is no kind of life for a passably attractive girl who could, if she’d make the slightest effort, find herself a nice man and settle down like all her high school friends have. Did I tell you that Joyce is expecting in October, by the way?”

I was torn between stomping out in a snit and staying there to feed my face, about which I cared very dearly. For the record, my apartment was dingy but not filthy, and I may have been reading a lot lately, but I was in no way hiding out. Hiding out would imply someone was looking for me, and as far as I could tell, no one was.

“Okay,” I said, “you win. I’ll put a real live bullet in my gun and march over to the Skaggses’ house. If Buster refuses to divulge the recipe for rhubarb conserve, I’ll blow his head off right there on the spot. About that sandwich...”

“I just told you Buster said Lucinda was visiting her sister in Hiana. I happen to know Lucinda’s sister is in a nursing home in Springfield.”

The conversation careened for a while, with me being called various names and being accused several times of failing to behave in a seemly fashion (a.k.a. one resulting in wedding vows and procreation). I participated only to needle her, and when the dust settled back on the barroom floor, I was standing on Lucinda Skaggs’s front porch. The paint was bubbling off the trim like crocodile skin and the screen was rusted, but behind me the grass was trimmed, the flower beds were bright with annuals, and the vegetable garden in the side yard was weedless and neatly mulched.

“Hey, Arly,” Buster said as he opened the door. “What can I do for you?” He was a small but muscular man with short gray hair and a face that sagged whenever his smile slipped. He was regarding me curiously, but without hostility.

I could have saved time by asking him if he’d murdered his wife, but it seemed less than neighborly. “Do you mind if I visit for a minute?”

“Sure, come on in.” He pulled the door back and gestured at me. “You’ll have to forgive the mess. Lucinda’s been gone a couple of weeks, and I’m not much of a housekeeper.”

With the exception of a newspaper and a beer can on the floor, the living room was immaculate. The throw pillows on the sofa were as smooth and plump as marshmallows, the arrangement of wildflowers was centered on the coffee table, the carpet still rippled from the vacuum cleaner. No magazines or books were in view, and unlike most living rooms in Maggody, no television set dominated the decor. On one wall an embroidered sampler declared that this was home, sweet home. Another hypothesized that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and a third, ringed with coy pink storks, proclaimed that Shelley Belinda Skaggs had weighed seven pounds two ounces on November third, 1975.

“Lucinda’s hobby,” Buster said as I leaned forward to feign admiration for the tiny stitches. “She says that it relaxes her, and that the devil finds work for idle hands.”

“They’re very nice,” I murmured. I sat down on the sofa and declined iced tea, coffee, and a beer. “I understand Lucinda’s visiting her sister.”

He gave me a wary look, but I chalked it up to the inanity of my remark. “Yeah, she’s strong on family ties. There’s a sampler in the kitchen that says, ‘The family that prays together stays together.’ I guess she and her sister have been on their knees going on two weeks now.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen Shelley around town in a while. Did she go with her mother?”

“Not hardly,” he said with a brittle laugh. “Shelley took off a couple of weeks ago. I keep thinking we’ll get a call from her, but we haven’t had so much as a postcard.”

“Took off?”

He shrugged, but he didn’t sound at all casual as he said, “Ran away is more like it, I suppose. She and Lucinda had an argument, and the next morning there was a note on the kitchen table. According to Lucinda, the acorn can’t stray far from the oak, but she may be wrong this time.”

I glanced at the sampler behind me and did a bit of calculation. “Shelley’s a minor. Have you notified the police in the nearby towns and the state police?”

“I wanted to, but Lucinda kept saying good riddance to bad rubbish. She was real upset with Shelley for coming home late one night and called her a slut and a lot of other nasty names. She’s always been real stern with Shelley, even when she was nothing but a little girl in pigtails. When Lucinda wasn’t whipping her, she was making her sit in a corner in her room and embroider quotations from the Bible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Lucinda say—” He broke off and covered his face with his hands.

It was not a challenge to complete his sentence: Spare the rod and spoil the child. I barely knew Lucinda Skaggs, but I was increasingly aware of how much I disliked her. She seemed to live from cliche to cliche, and I suspected she would have some piercing ones for yours truly.

I waited until Buster wiped his eyes and attempted to smile. “I’ll call the state police and alert them about Shelley. While you make a list of the names and addresses of your family and friends, I need to look through her things to see if I can find any leads. Also, we’ll need a recent photograph.”

Buster nodded and took me to Shelley’s bedroom. It was as stark as the living room, with dreary beige walls, a matching bedspread, a bare lightbulb in the middle of the ceiling, and only the basic pieces of furniture. A brush and comb were aligned on the dresser. The drawers contained a meager amount of folded underthings, sweaters, and T-shirts. In the closet, skirts and blouses were separated and hung neatly; had it been plausible, I was sure they would have been alphabetized. There were no boxes on the shelf, no notebooks or diaries in the drawers, no letters hidden under the mattress. The only splash of color came from a braided rug on the hardwood floor. The room, I concluded, could have passed inspection in a convent. Handily.

I paused to see which pithy statements Lucinda had chosen for her daughter’s walls. “Pride goeth before a fall.” “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Not quite as lighthearted as posters and pinups of movie stars, I thought as I returned to the living room.

Buster gave me a photograph of a teenaged girl, her smile as starched as her white blouse. Her hair was pulled back so tightly that there were faint creases at the corners of her eyes, which regarded the camera with contemptuous appraisal. I was not surprised that she wore no makeup or jewelry.

I put the photograph in my shirt pocket. “I’ll return this to you as soon as possible.”

“Here are a few addresses of relatives,” he said as he handed me a piece of paper, “but I’ve already spoken to them and they promised to let me know if Shelley shows up.”

I skimmed the list. “What about Shelley’s aunt in Hiana?”

“She wouldn’t set foot in that place, not with her mother being there.” He looked down for a moment. “The telephone was disconnected, but I’ll run up there this evening and fetch Lucinda. It’s getting too quiet around here with both of them gone.”

I promised to let him know what the police had to say, although I doubted it would amount to much. As I drove away, it occurred to me I’d exchanged a pseudo-missing person for a real one. The reverse would have been more palatable. And Ruby Bee’s scalloped potatoes would have been more palatable than the can of soup I planned to have for dinner, but I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with the thumbscrews served alongside them.

“Guess we got all excited over nothing,” Ruby Bee said with a sigh. “Lucinda came home last night, and sent Buster by first thing this morning with the recipe.” She squinted at the index card. “This won Lucinda a blue ribbon at the county fair last fall. As soon as I get a chance, I’m going to try it.”

Estelle pensively chewed a pretzel. “What did Arly have to say about her little visit yesterday?”

“I haven’t laid eyes on her,” Ruby Bee admitted, wondering if she could get decent rhubarb at the supermarket across the road. “But now that Lucinda’s back, I guess it was nothing but a wild goose chase. Of course, we only have Buster’s word that she really is back.”

“Lottie said she caught a glimpse of her at six fifteen, putting out the garbage by the back door like she always does. She thought Lucinda looked thin, but I suppose all that bother with her sister must be worrisome.”

Ruby Bee put down the recipe, propped her elbows on the bar, and tugged on her chin. “I still don’t know why Buster lied about that. It doesn’t make a whisker of sense, him saying Lucinda was in Hiana with her sister.”

“He was addled,” Estelle said firmly.

This time Ruby Bee did not resort to wiping the counter. Instead, she picked up the card, studied it with a deepening frown, and then, in a peculiar voice, said, “I don’t know, Estelle. I just don’t know.”

I figured I had two options. I could park up by the skeletal remains of Purtle’s Esso Station and nab speeders, or I could sit in the PD and swat flies. Both required physical exertion, and I was taking a nap when Ruby Bee and Estelle stormed through the door.

Ruby Bee banged down a small bowl on my desk. “I told you so.”

In that she told me some fool thing every hour, I wasn’t sure how to field this one. “Told me what?” I finally said.

“I told you that Lucinda Skaggs didn’t visit her sister in Hiana. Just taste this.”

“And don’t be all day about it,” Estelle added. “This is an emergency.”

I leaned forward and studied the goopy red contents of the bowl, then shook my head. “Sorry, ladies, I never taste anything that could be a living organism. A primeval one, to be sure, but perhaps in the midst of some sort of evolutionary breakthrough.”

Ruby Bee put her hands on her hips. “Taste it.”

“Oh, all right, but it better be good.” Trying not to wince, I put my fingers in the goop, plucked out a bite-sized lump, and conveyed it to my mouth without dribbling on my shirt. I regretted it immediately. My lips were sucked into my mouth, and the interior of my cheeks converged on my retreating tongue. Only decorum prevented me from spitting it out. “Yuck! This is awful!”

“No, it’s not,” Ruby Bee said, “or it’s not supposed to be, anyway. It’s Lucinda Skaggs’s spiced rhubarb conserve, and it won a blue ribbon at the county fair last year.”

I washed out my mouth with lukewarm coffee. “If it did, there was a good deal of bribery. This is absolutely awful. Maybe you didn’t follow the recipe correctly, because this nasty stuff could turn someone’s face inside out.”

Estelle flapped an index card at me. “Are you saying Ruby Bee doesn’t know how to follow a recipe, Miss Cordan Blue? There’s not much to it — you slice your orange and your lemon, add your water, your vinegar, and your rhubarb, put in a little bag with gingerroot, cinnamon candies, mace, and cloves, and simmer until it gets nice and thick.” She paused so dramatically that I realized I was holding my breath. “Your raisins are optional.”

“And I followed the recipe right down to the cup of raisins,” Ruby Bee snapped. “Now what do you aim to do about Lucinda Skaggs?”

I was still sipping coffee to get rid of the painfully tart taste in my mouth. “Decapitation? Force feeding?”

“She never came home,” Estelle said, enunciating slowly so that the less perceptive of us in the PD could follow along. “This spiced rhubarb conserve proves it.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “She came home yesterday evening. Buster told me he was driving to Hiana to fetch her, and she did give you the recipe for this vile concoction, didn’t she?”

Ruby Bee glowered at the offending goop, and then at the offending chief of police. “Buster said she copied it down for me, but she didn’t. She may not be the most charitable woman in town, but she did win a blue ribbon and there’s no way on God’s green earth that she sent this recipe to me.”

“Why not?” I asked meekly.

Estelle stuck the card under my nose. “Just take a look for yourself, missy. Where’s the sugar?”

“That’s right,” Ruby Bee said, looming over me like a maternal monolith. “Where’s the sugar?”

This time I was standing on Lottie Estes’s front porch, knocking on her door. A curtain twitched, and shortly thereafter, Lottie opened the door, gave me a crisp smile, and said, “Afternoon, Arly.”

“I wanted to ask you a few questions about your neighbors,” I began. Before I could continue, I was pulled inside, placed on the sofa, and cautioned to stay quiet until the shades were lowered and the curtains were drawn.

“We can’t be too careful,” Lottie whispered as she sat down beside me and patted my knee. “Now, what would you like to know?”

“Is Lucinda Skaggs home?” I asked.

“Why, I believe she is. This morning when I happened to be in my guest bedroom hunting for a pattern, I noticed that the light went on at six and she put out the garbage at exactly six fifteen. At seven thirty, Buster came out and got in his truck, then stopped and went back to the door. Lucinda handed him a card, and he returned to the truck and left, giving me a little wave as he drove by.”

“And you saw her?”

Lottie’s wrinkled cheeks reddened as she took off her bifocals and cleaned them with a tissue that appeared almost magically from her cuff. “I didn’t want them to think I was spying on them, so I did stay behind the sheers. But, yes, I saw Lucinda for a second when she put out the garbage, and I heard her speak quite sternly to her husband when she gave him the card. She said something along the lines of ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed.’ I couldn’t hear Buster’s response, even though I had opened the window just a bit to enjoy the morning breeze.”

I was amazed that she hadn’t used binoculars and a wiretap. I thanked her for her information, but as I started for the door, an unpleasant thought occurred to me. “Two weeks ago,” I said, “did you happen to be hunting for a pattern in the guest bedroom and see Buster carrying a duffel bag or a rolled carpet to his truck?”

“Oh, heavens no,” she said with a nervous laugh. “However, I was doing a bit of dusting one morning when I saw him carry a braided rug into the house.”

I could feel bifocaled eyes on my back as I walked across the yard to the Skaggses’ house. I knocked on the door, then turned around to gaze at the garden. The bushy bean and pea plants were already thick, and the zucchini leaves were broad green fans. The tomato plants, although not yet a foot high, were encased with cylindrical wire cages.

The door opened behind me. Without turning back, I said, “Your garden’s coming along nicely. I suppose Lucinda does a lot of canning in the fall.”

“Tomatoes, beans, beets, turnips, greens, all that,” Buster murmured. “A penny saved, you know...”

“Is a penny earned,” I said, now looking at him. “I thought of another one while I was walking over here. Like to hear it?” He nodded unenthusiastically. “Little strokes fell great oaks.”

“Is there something you wanted, Arly?”

“I’d like to speak to Lucinda about her recipe for spiced rhubarb conserve. Ruby Bee made a batch of it this afternoon, and it was inedible.”

“I can’t imagine that. It won a blue ribbon at the fair.”

I opened the screen door, but he remained in the doorway, his arms folded. “I brought it with me so Lucinda could check it,” I said, showing him the card.

“She’s asleep. She’s real fond of the one about the early bird catching the worm. I’d rather have ham and eggs myself.” He reached out to take the card, but I lowered my hand. “I’ll have her take a look at it in the morning. If there’s something wrong, she can fix it up and I’ll get it back to Ruby Bee.”

“I had a call from the state police,” I said, ignoring his vague attempt to reach the recipe card. “You’ll be delighted to know they’ve located Shelley at a shelter in Farberville.”

“They have?” he said uncertainly. He swallowed several times and licked his lips until they glistened like the surface of the rhubarb goop. “That’s great, Arly. I was really worried about her. So was Lucinda, although she won’t admit it. That was the reason she left the next day to visit her sister in Hiana. I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.”

“You said something interesting when we were discussing where Shelley might have gone,” I continued. “You said Shelley wouldn’t go to Hiana because her mother was there. How would Shelley have known her mother was there?”

He shook his head and gave me a bewildered look, but I wasn’t in the mood to play Lieutenant Columbo and drag the ordeal out until the last commercial.

I held up the card once more and said, “The handwriting matches the list you wrote for me yesterday. You copied the recipe, but omitted the sugar. Lucinda wouldn’t have, since she’s made it often and is a meticulous person. Let’s return to Mr. Franklin’s ‘Little strokes fell great oaks.’ Lucinda might not have cared to be characterized as a tree, but I doubt it took little strokes to fell her. What did it take?”

His face and everything else about him sagged. “She was screaming at Shelley, spitting on her and slapping her. I couldn’t stand it any more. I told her to shut up. She started screaming at me, and I pushed her away from me. She fell, hit her head on the edge of the kitchen table.”

“I don’t think so. When we do an investigation, we’ll determine the details, but it didn’t happen in the kitchen. It happened in Shelley’s room, which is why you took Shelley to Hiana and brought back a braided rug to cover the bloodstains.”

“It was an accident,” a defiant voice said. Shelley joined her father in the doorway, dressed in a dowdy robe. Her head was covered with hair rollers and a scarf; no doubt Lottie was convinced she’d spotted Lucinda for a second at the back door. “I was the one who pushed her, but I didn’t mean for her to hit her head. Or maybe way in the back of my mind, I wanted it to happen.” Although her expression did not change, her eyes filled with tears that began to slink down her cheeks.

Buster put his arm around his daughter. “I pushed her. God knows she’s had it coming for twenty years.”

Shelley looked up at him. “ ‘The heart of the fool is in his mouth.’ ”

“ ‘But the mouth of the wise man is in his heart,’ ” he countered sadly.

“We’ll sort those out later,” I said before we got lost between quotation marks. “Where’s the body?”

Neither answered, but both of them glanced furtively over my shoulder. I studied the neat rows of tomato plants, each ringed with mulch and exuding the promise of a rich red crop later in the summer. I cast around in my mind for a suitable quote, and although my Biblical training was sparse, I found one. “ ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.’ ”

Buster managed a wry smile. “Lucinda would have appreciated it. As she was so fond of saying, ‘Waste not, want not.’ ”