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Ms. Dee Ann Meets Murder

By Patsy Hinton Pridgen

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Chapter 1
I stared out the passenger window of my father-in-law’s brand new 1979 Chevrolet pick-up to avoid talking to Joe. Behind me, I could hear the edges of nylon tarp flapping in the wind. Underneath that tarp was a good portion of what we owned, piled high in the truck bed, stacked precariously with a small trough left in the middle so Joe could see out the rearview mirror.

Occasionally, I turned my head to peek at Heather in her infant seat between Joe and me, lulled to sleep by the engine’s drone, her delicate mouth puckered, faintly nursing. Having this baby had turned my world upside down, but I felt a surge of love each time I glimpsed her wispy blonde hair and pink chubby cheeks.

Joe was looking straight ahead at the road with his hands on the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock, just like we were taught way back in driver’s education in high school. He wasn’t paying me the least bit of attention.

“Do you want to stop at the 7-Eleven up ahead for a Dr. Pepper, Dee Ann?”

Maybe he had been thinking about me, a little bit anyway.

“No, I’m fine. Aren’t we almost there?” I sounded small and shaky, not like my usual confident self at all.

“Not much longer. I just thought you might be thirsty.”

We’d been on the road a good two hours according to my wristwatch. During that time, I’d noticed the homes getting farther and farther apart. Small brick ranches with sagging carports and aging farmhouses with peeling paint. Mobile homes, single-wide and double-wide. We’d been through a couple of one-stoplight towns, sad little places, each with a run-down five and dime and an old Colonial Store.

Oh, I was feeling a lot of things, but thirsty wasn’t one of them. Why had I ever agreed to move?

I thought about the cardboard boxes of linens, dishes, and clothes that Joe and his dad had heaved onto the back of the truck early that morning. “Why in the world did Dee Ann get such big boxes and then pack them so full?” I’d heard Joe’s dad complain. “They’re so doggone heavy I can hardly pick them up.”

Somehow I felt better knowing that Joe and his dad had to strain to lift those boxes. Being miserable myself, I wanted somebody else to be miserable too. I admit I can be mean like that.

Nope, I didn’t care how heavy those boxes were. I wasn’t going to lift a thing. After all, I had Heather to tend to. Besides that, I carried only one hundred and ten pounds on my five-foot, six-inch frame, even three months after having a baby, and a skinny girl like me couldn’t be expected to pick up heavy stuff.

Those boxes would soon join some hand-me-down furniture and an old Toyota Corolla that Joe and his dad had moved earlier in the week. We’d been married only sixteen months, since December 14, 1977, so Joe and I were newlywed poor. There’s no disgrace in that. Everybody starts out that way, at least everybody I’ve ever known, even people with college educations like Joe and me.

Joe’s mother says it’s good to be poor when you first get married. She says it makes you stronger as a couple. I don’t know how worrying about paying the rent makes for a happier marriage, but I didn’t tell her that. It would’ve been disrespectful to openly disagree.

We were young-people poor, though, no doubt about it. I hadn’t worked since college, there being an oversupply of high school English teachers when I finished my Master’s in Education. But Joe found a job at a finance company after graduation, so we got married anyway. And then, surprise, surprise! Before I could land anything full-time, I was expecting a baby and learned nobody wants to hire a woman who’s soon going on maternity leave.

So making a living had fallen entirely on Joe, but our parents said he was the man of the house after all and should take care of earning the money. When he heard about an opening for a collector at Narrow Creek Community Bank, a position that paid slightly more than he was making, he applied. His dad put in a good word with somebody who knew somebody at the bank, so Joe probably had an advantage in the interview.

Of course, Joe’s a good hire for anybody. He has a cheerful personality and an easy way with people. He’s nice looking too, if I do say so myself, and it never hurts to be an attractive person when you’re dealing with the public. I’d say his blue eyes and ruddy complexion are his best features. And his sunny smile.

Joe’s position at the bank was entry-level so our money worries were far from over, but Joe said there was more opportunity in being a banker. I think he liked the idea of wearing a dark suit and sitting behind a big mahogany desk.

When I told him that, though, he just laughed. “I won’t be sitting behind that desk when I have to go out and call on people past due on their payments. But I’ll sure look good in my suit when I put up and take down the American flag in front of the bank every day. That’s also part of my job as the new man.” I decided Joe wouldn’t be getting too proud on me any time soon. Despite our college degrees, I wanted us to stay humble and not give our families a chance to say we’d gotten above our raising.

There was certainly no way anyone could accuse Joe and me of being uppity by moving to Narrow Creek, North Carolina. Joe and I had grown up near Greenville, a university town of thirty thousand people. Narrow Creek had five thousand souls. I’d heard there wasn’t even a K-Mart there.

Whenever I’d questioned moving to such a small town in an isolated part of the state, Joe had given me the same little pep talk in his unruffled manner of speaking: “Narrow Creek’s not so bad, Dee Ann. I’m sure you’ll find something to do there. I bet you’ll meet a lot of friendly people, and before long it’ll feel like home.”

Home, indeed! I suspected Joe just liked the hunting and fishing opportunities provided by all that rural area surrounding the town, and I’d told him so.

“I don’t deny that I’m excited about the outdoor life there,” he’d admitted. “Do you know we’ll be only a few miles from two state parks? I’ve been told there’s a lot of duck hunting in the area too. I’ve never been duck hunting.”

Evidently Joe Bulluck didn’t mind leaving our hometown one bit if doing so gave him a chance to shoot a duck. It didn’t seem to faze him that I’d have nothing to do in a sleepy little town like Narrow Creek while he was out pretending to be the Great White Hunter.

To win me over, he’d promised we wouldn't have to live there forever. “Probably just a couple of years,” he kept saying, “and then I’ll get a promotion and be transferred, maybe to a larger town closer to home.”

“For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge,” I finally told myself, quoting Ruth from the Old Testament. Ruth, a young widow, stays with her mother-in-law Naomi, but that verse can also apply to wives who are asked to follow husbands who move for job promotions. Especially wives who are new mothers and don’t have jobs themselves.

But I admit that I’m a lot more self-centered than Ruth. I don’t think Ruth found fault with her new home, and she probably didn’t cry about it either. It has always been my observation that it’s hard for real people to be as good as the role models in the Bible.

I cranked down my window a bit to let in some of the pleasant April air, thinking a whiff of spring would cheer me up. No sooner had my hand left the window handle than I heard an awful thud. I whipped my head around, peered out the back window of the truck, and was shocked by what I saw: Heather’s white bassinet on its side in the middle of the road.

“Stop, Joe! The baby’s bed fell off!”

Joe’s eyes widened as if I had startled him out of a daydream about last year’s hunting season. He immediately slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side of the road. Between my yelling and his skidding, Heather woke up with her signature earsplitting wail.

Joe yanked the gear shift into reverse and quickly backed up to where the bassinet had landed. He jumped out of the cab and ran the last few steps as I opened my door and scooped up Heather. Joe was muttering to himself as I came up behind him.

“Hell’s bells. Dee Ann’s gonna have a hissy fit.”

He was right. “Joe Bulluck, how in the world did this happen? My grandmother slept in this bassinet. My father slept in this bassinet. What would my mother say if she knew our family’s antique bassinet went flying out of the back of the truck to land smack dab in the middle of the road like some old candy bar wrapper?”

“It doesn’t look that bad,” Joe said as Heather’s squalling reached an even higher pitch. “Just one wheel a little out of whack. The basket is fine.”

I don’t know how Joe could call black skid marks where white paint used to be “fine,” but at least the bassinet was still in one piece. Now, though, the tears I had worked so hard to hold back all morning started rolling down my face.

“Get back in the truck, Dee Ann,” Joe said in a harsh voice. Although a lot of men are reduced to mush when women cry, Joe often reacts by getting a little ugly, which was the main reason I’d been trying not to tear up.

“I’m doing the best I can moving all this stuff by myself,” he went on. “I know you’re going through a lot leaving home, but you don’t have to get hysterical. Today’s not easy for me either, but you don’t see me crying on the side of the road.”

A small voice inside my head told me maybe, just maybe, Joe had a point. Moving was hard for everybody, and perhaps I was being a tad difficult. But I couldn’t seem to help myself. I needed to have the last word.

“I’ll cry on the side of the road if I want to,” I shot back. “Who’s going to see me? Look around you, Joe. We’re the only people out here.”

We stared at each other for a second, and then I saw Joe look beyond me to a newly plowed field. The smell of freshly tilled soil was in the air, along with the scent of something sweet—maybe that wild purple wisteria that blooms in the early spring. Across the road, thick woods, mostly pine trees, crept to the edge of the ditch.

I opened my mouth to let him have it again, but then he softened and used that line he loves: “Everything will be all right.”

Did I mention that Joe is a positive thinker? Unlike me, he doesn’t seem to worry about a whole lot in life. He says things will usually turn out fine if you just have the right attitude.

I do enough worrying for both of us. Joe calls me high strung. He says I’m just looking for trouble.

I stumbled back to the truck with Heather, whose wailing had turned into a steady crying jag, a pattern I recognized only too well. A dusty maroon car coming from the opposite direction slowed down, and a skinny old white man in a John Deere cap stared at Joe and the bassinet before easing around the scene of the accident. He didn’t even roll down his window to ask if he could help.

I climbed into the cab of the truck, which wasn’t easy between holding Heather and being somewhat blinded by tears. I was still fuming. A banged-up bassinet. And not just some bassinet out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Oh no, my family’s heirloom bassinet.

Heather and I were both still crying when Joe got in the truck.

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