She sat perfectly still, her face without expression, her hands resting on top of her folded parasol. She gazed through the doorway that gave on to the cells. They were empty, except for a town drunkard, who slept in a fetal position on the floor. The sheriff looked over his shoulder at the cells.
"Somet'ing wrong?" he said.
"Nobody is locked up for killing Miss Carrie."
"She knew a lot of bad t'ings about lots of people," he said. He seemed to study his own words, his expression growing solemn and profound with their implication.
"She gave Miss Abby the money to buy our school. That's why she's dead," Flower said.
But the sheriff was shaking his head even before she had finished her statement.
"I wouldn't say that, Miss Flower. There's lots of people had it in for Carrie LaRose. Lots of-"
"There was a white camellia by her foot. Everybody knows what the white camellia means."
"Miss Carrie had camellias growing in her side yard. It don't mean a__"
"Shame on the people who claimed to be her friend. Shame on every one of them. You don't need to be helping me transfer the deed, either," Flower said. She looked the sheriff in the eyes, then rose from her chair and walked out the door.
She used the one hundred dollars to buy books for the school and to hire carpenters and painters to refurbish her new house. She and Abigail dug flower beds around the four sides of the house, spadin
g the clay out of the subsoil so that each bed was like an elongated ceramic tray. They hauled black dirt from the cane fields and mixed it in the wagon with sheep manure and humus from the swamp, then filled the beds with it and planted roses, hibiscus, azalea bushes, windmill palms, hydrangeas and banana trees all around the house.
On the evening the painters finished the last of the trim, Flower and Abigail sat on a blanket under the live oak in back and drank lemonade and ate fried chicken from a basket and looked at the perfect glow and symmetry of the house in the sunset. Flower's belongings were piled in Abigail's buggy, waiting to be moved inside.
"I cain't believe all this is happening to me, Miss Abby," Flower said.
"You're a lady of property. One of these days you'll have to stop calling me 'Miss Abby,'" Abigail said.
"Not likely," Flower said.
"You're a dear soul. You deserve every good thing in the world. You don't know how much you mean to me."
"Miss Abby, sometime you make me a little uncomfortable, the way you talk to me."
"I wasn't aware of that," Abigail replied, her face coloring.
"I'm just fussy today," Flower said.
"I'll try to be a bit more sensitive," Abigail said.
"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Miss Abby. Come on now," she said, patting the top of Abigail's hand.
But Abigail removed her hand and began putting her food back in the picnic basket.
THE next morning Flower woke in the feather-stuffed bed that had belonged to Carrie LaRose. The wind was cool through the windows, the early sunlight flecked with rain. During the night she had heard horses on the road and loud voices from the saloon next door, perhaps those of night riders whose reputation was spreading through the countryside, but she kept the.36 caliber revolver from McCain's Hardware under her bed, five chambers loaded, with fresh percussion caps on each of the nipples. She did not believe the Knights of the White Camellia or the members of the White League were the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers. In fact, she believed they were moral and physical cowards who hid their failure under bedsheets and she fantasized that one day the men who had attacked her would return, garbed in hoods and robes, and she would have the chance to do something unspeakable and painful to each of them.
Through her open window she could hear a piece of paper flapping. She got up from the bed and walked barefoot to the front door and opened it. Tied to the door handle with a piece of wire were a thin, rolled newspaper printed with garish headlines and a note written on a piece of hand-soiled butcher paper.
The note read:
Dear Nigger,
Glad you can read. See what you think about the article on you and
the Yankee bitch who thinks her shit don't stink.
We got nothing against you. Just don't mess with us.