Miss Dimple Suspects by Mignon F. Ballard Page B

Esau added. “It’s hard to see up here after dark.”
    “I’d offer you some of this cake,” their hostess said after the couple had left, “but I doubt if it’s fit to eat. Coralee means well, bless her heart, but she either stints on the sugar or doesn’t bake it long enough.” To demonstrate, she gave the dish a shake. “See there—not even done in the middle!”
    “I guess we should be getting back,” Charlie said. “I don’t want to run off the road in the dark.”
    “Oh, don’t pay any mind to Esau!” Mae Martha poked up the fire. “Sit and visit a spell.”
    “Miss Dimple tells me you studied at Emory,” Annie said, turning to Suzy. “Is that where you got to know Mrs. Hawthorne’s grandson?”
    Suzy nodded. “Madison and I had several classes together.”
    “And lucky for me they did!” Mae Martha inched her chair closer to the fire. “I’d have been in a fix without her, especially now that Madison’s gone. Esau and Coralee—Isaac, too—they’re mighty good to me, but they’ve farms and a blacksmith shop to run, and when I was so sick last March, Madison didn’t like me being here alone. That was right before he shipped out.”
    “You must be very proud of him,” Miss Dimple said, and that was all Mae Martha needed to take a cigar box of letters down from the mantel. “I’d be a whole lot prouder if he was still alive,” she said. “His mama and daddy were taken with the typhoid fever when Madison was just a little thing and this is about all I have left.”
    While Mrs. Hawthorne shared her grandson’s correspondence with Dimple, Charlie and Annie had a chance to talk with Suzy, who had seemed reluctant to say much earlier. Now she wanted to know about their lives as teachers and Annie’s experience living in a boardinghouse, while they were curious about her life on a large university campus.
    “Do you ever get homesick?” Annie asked, and Suzy shook her head. She didn’t answer for a while, and when she did, her eyes held a faraway expression. “A little, I suppose,” she said, “but I was raised here in the States—in California.”
    Charlie frowned. “Don’t you ever have a chance to get out—to town, I mean, to see a picture or do some shopping?”
    “Oh, Esau and Coralee, and once in awhile Bill will bring me what I need when they go into town. I really don’t mind being here.”
    “Do you think Mae Martha would care if we came for you some Saturday? We could have lunch at the drugstore, look around in the shops, or just visit.” Annie kept her voice low so she wouldn’t offend Mae Martha.
    “Shoot! You don’t have to whisper around me,” that lady said. “Suzy knows she’s free to go where and when she likes. Max and I will be just fine, but I never learned to drive so I don’t have a car, and she has to depend on somebody else to give her a ride.”
    “I’m going to write down my phone number, and Annie’s and Miss Dimple’s, too,” Charlie said as they were getting ready to leave. “Now promise you’ll call one of us when you’re ready for the grand tour of Elderberry. And we’d love for both of you to come—that is, if you think you can stand the excitement.”
    Suzy accepted the piece of paper reluctantly. “I don’t want to impose—”
    “Oh, shush, girl!” Mae Martha told her. “I’m happy here with my paints and my dog, but you’re too young to be cooped up all the time.
    “She’ll be calling,” she said aside to Charlie as she followed them to the door. “You can count on it.”
    *   *   *
    “Suzy doesn’t seem especially eager to visit us in town,” Annie worried as they bumped their way back down the hill in the dark. “I’d think she’d be more than ready for a break.”
    “I know I would be,” Charlie agreed. “I hope she doesn’t think we’re trying to force her or anything. I like Mae Martha a lot, but I’d go crazy up there all the time.”
    Dimple Kilpatrick didn’t say a word, but she