Miss Dimple Suspects by Mignon F. Ballard Page A

see us!”
    Dimple didn’t see how such a thundering voice could come from a woman so frail but was happy to see Mae Martha’s young companion step quietly from what she assumed was her bedroom. She relayed messages from Peggy’s grateful parents to both women, and although Suzy was courteous and thanked her for coming, she seemed uneasy in her presence.
    “Miss Dimple, you have to come and see these!” Charlie called from a doorway off the kitchen.
    “Oh, you must be Suzy,” she said, seeing the other woman had joined them. “I’m Charlie, and my friend Annie is in there trying to decide which of those wonderful paintings she likes best. I like all of them, but can only buy one … that is, if they’re for sale…”
    Mae Martha flushed and laced her fingers together. “Shoot! You all are gonna give me the big head. My nephew Isaac usually takes care of that kind of thing, but it doesn’t matter to me. You go on and pick out whichever ones you want and pay me what you can.”
    Miss Dimple turned to Suzy. “There must be a price list,” she said softly so that Mae Martha couldn’t hear, and Suzy smiled and shook her head. “There is one of sorts, but she has no idea of her talent,” she whispered. Everyone followed the artist into the room that obviously served as her studio, where several easels stood near the windows and a large table and several chairs took up one side of the room across from shelves cluttered with paints and brushes. Stacks of finished paintings lined the space that was left. The room had originally been used as a dining room, Mae Martha told them, but she chose it to paint in because it got the best light. Charlie had selected an oil painting of a man fishing from the banks of a small stream for her sister. “Our father loved to fish,” she explained. “I don’t think he ever caught a thing, but he didn’t seem to care.” She didn’t add that the father, for whom she was named, had died several years before.
    Miss Dimple chose one of two children picking blackberries. The little boy wore overalls such as her brother, Henry, had worn, and the girl, a purple dress with an apron smeared with berry juice. A sunbonnet much like the one young Dimple had worn hung down her back. The painting was priced at twenty-five dollars, which seemed an enormous amount to her, but over Mae Martha’s protests, she wrote a check for the full amount. What fun it would be to watch her brother open his Christmas present!
    Annie finally decided on a watercolor of people gathered outside a country church, and Mae Martha flatly refused to take more than ten dollars from either of the young women. “I know how hard it is on you young ones just startin’ out, and what Isaac doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” she told them.
    Less than five minutes passed, it seemed, before Max began barking and Mae Martha’s nephew Esau turned up at the door along with his wife, Coralee.
    Coralee and Esau Ingram reminded Dimple of Jack Spratt and his wife of nursery rhyme fame. Wiry and thin, Esau lacked an inch or so of being as tall as his wife, while Coralee bulged in every place one could bulge, Dimple thought, and seemed out of breath from walking the short distance from the car to the door.
    “Bill said he saw you folks headed this way, so I thought—well, Coralee and me—we thought you might like some of her sweet potato cake.”
    His aunt accepted the offering with thanks and introduced her visitors. “Miss Dimple here was the lady who found that poor little girl who got lost, but she tells me she’s doing a lot better. Got to have her tonsils out, though.
    “Law, Suzy, I’ll bet we’ve done let that fire die down!” Mae Martha turned to lead the way into the living room. “You folks come on in here and sit yourselves down.”
    “I wish we could, Auntie, but it looks like rain, and I’d better rush home and get the clothes off the line,” Coralee said.
    “Best be careful on this road coming down,”