Life and Death in Narrow Creek

By Patsy Pridgen

It’s 1982, and Dee Ann Bulluck has enjoyed three peaceful years as a young wife, mother, and technical college instructor since moving to a backyard apartment in small-town Narrow Creek, North Carolina. Then her landlord Floyd Powell dies while sitting in his recliner on a calm Saturday morning. Turns out, his death is due to something more sinister than his diet of honey buns and Pepsi Colas, and the major suspect is Miss Josie, his wife of thirty-five years.

Convinced of Miss Josie’s innocence—and by the fact that if her landlady goes to jail, she and husband Joe will likely lose their sweet deal of an apartment—Dee Ann agrees to help Miss Josie prove she's blameless. Their bumbling investigation manages to reveal Floyd’s involvement in some unsavory enterprises, including bootlegging. The reappearance of Miss Josie’s long-lost beau and the meddling of her overbearing, big-city daughter complicate their amateur sleuthing.

Her landlord may be dead, but Dee Ann is busy with life: Monday night choir practice at the Methodist church, house-hunting with Joe, and controlling mischievous three-year-old Heather. She barely has time to hide in Miss Josie’s closet to eavesdrop or creep through the woods looking for a still. Will Miss Josie wind up in the big house while Dee Ann ends up with no house?

Like its heroine Dee Ann Bulluck, Life and Death in Narrow Creek is smart and sassy, witty and insightful. Readers will discover a cozy mystery warmed by the culture yet complicated by the social issues of the early 1980s in a small Southern town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662916953

Book preview

Chapter 1

My second-hand Electrolux was certainly keeping a fuss, as my grandma used to say. Three-year-old Heather, her head of blonde curls bent over a coloring book, dropped a fat red crayon and clapped her hands over her ears. Too much noise! she shouted.

I had to laugh hearing the exact words I often said to her when she ran around the apartment squealing, delighted to be chased by her silly daddy. Her silly daddy—and my husband, Joe Bulluck—who on this crisp Saturday morning in October was not at home with us but rather forty miles away in the woods hunting deer.

I cut off my thrift store vacuum cleaner. It wasn’t working all that well anyway, but I wasn’t ready to splurge on a new one. Joe and I were still in the first few years of our marriage, and although I’d finally gone to work full-time so that we were now a two-income family, neither of us made a lot of money.

In my case, nobody gets rich teaching English in a technical college, and as for Joe, he was inching his way up the corporate ladder at Narrow Creek Community Bank. As the assistant branch manager, he was one rung up from the bottom where he’d started when we’d moved to Narrow Creek, North Carolina, three and a half years earlier.

I’d come to Narrow Creek—population 5,113, according to the 1980 census—with a new baby, no job myself, and a bad attitude. I hadn’t wanted to leave my hometown for a place so remote there wasn’t even a K-Mart. A place too far from family to get any help with Heather. A place where I knew no one except the husband who’d brought me there to advance his career. It’d taken me a year to find a job at the Tech, new friends, and contentment. Now, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

I lifted Heather from her booster seat at the kitchen table and saddled her on my hip. She wrapped her sweet, chubby arms around me and looked at me with bright blue eyes that are so like Joe’s. She has Joe’s solid build, too, with an extra roll around her middle, just like her daddy. On a toddler, it’s cute. Joe, however, could stand to lay off the Little Debbies.

Even though Heather didn’t inherit my thin frame, she does have my fine, blonde hair. To give mine body, I kept it permed like Sandy’s in the last scene of Grease. Not to be bragging, but wearing my hair that way, I had more than one person tell me I resembled Olivia Newton-John. Thanks to the Kut and Kurl, my hair was as beauty-shop curly as Heather’s was naturally.

I couldn’t help but kiss her plump cheek. She was the prettiest child in the world. If anyone ever wanted to photograph the Gerber baby as a toddler, my Heather could’ve been the model.

Our upstairs apartment, built over a first-floor oversized storage building, had a combination living room-dining room-kitchen, so we reached the television in just a few steps. Let’s see if we can find some cartoons this morning, sweetie pie. I know early education experts warn about letting children watch too much television, but I don’t see any harm in a little Bugs Bunny or Road Runner. During the summer when I wasn’t teaching and Heather and I spent all our time together, I looked forward to putting her down in front of Captain Kangaroo for a few minutes while I got a load of clothes in the washing machine or cleaned up the kitchen from breakfast. And Heather certainly hadn’t seemed to suffer from her television viewing. She was turning out to be bright as a bulb.

I’d adjusted the volume when I happened to glance out the window and spied Willie, the Powells’ hired help, spring out the sliding back door of their two-story, brick Colonial. Willie was old and arthritic and until that morning, I’d never seen him move very fast. I’d also never seen him on the back porch of the Powells’ place, let alone coming out of the house itself. He was the Powells’ yard man, which to this older couple soaked in segregation meant he didn’t enter the house.

Floyd and Josephine Powell were fair landlords, renting Joe and me the upstairs apartment they’d built over the storage building in their backyard, and Miss Josie, as I called her, had become a good friend, something like Heather’s Narrow Creek grandma. But I always felt bad about the way the Powells treated Willie, calling him colored and bossing him around without so much as a please or thank you for anything he did. It was 1982, but the Civil Rights Movement had evidently bypassed some folks, people like the Powells, who’d lived a good bit of their lives in the Jim Crow era.

On what had been a tranquil Saturday morning, this feeble old man was running across the yard to my upstairs apartment like his hair was on fire. What in the world was wrong?

I opened the door to a wild-eyed Willie. Miss Dee Ann, come quick. Miss Josie need help. Mr. Floyd done fell out this mornin’.

Having delivered this summons, Willie spun around and sprinted back across the yard. Fell out? Was Floyd hurt? Had he had a heart attack, a stroke? I hoped there wasn’t any blood. I have a strong aversion to the sight of it. I was afraid of what I might see in the Powells’ house but had no choice except to follow Willie.

Darn that Joe Bulluck, I muttered under my breath as I trotted over to the Powells’. If he were home like he ought to be, I could send him to help and spare both Heather and me anything traumatic. As it was, not only did I have to go next door, but I couldn’t leave a three-year-old by herself, especially one with Heather’s potential for mischief, so there I was hauling her along for who knew what.

I got Miss Dee Ann like you ask, Willie was saying as I entered the Powells’ dark den. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Soon enough, though, I spied Floyd Powell, lying peacefully in his brown leather recliner, propped way back, just the way I’d often seen him when I visited Miss Josie. But beneath his shock of thick white hair, his eyes were half open, glazed and lifeless. There was no blood, thank you, Jesus. Floyd looked as though he’d gone gentle into that good night, against the advice of the poet Dylan Thomas, who wrote that we should rage against the dying of the light. English majors like me think of lines like these all the time.

Miss Josie, dressed in a beige polyester pant suit, hovered over Floyd. Her short grey hair looked freshly styled in its usual teased bouffant. At sixty-five, she still resembled the dark-haired beauty in the gold-framed wedding picture on an end table. Time had added a few more pounds to her petite frame along with a sprinkling of wrinkles radiating from the corners of her hazel eyes, but her classic features and spirited smile were the same.

She glanced up as I entered the room. I can’t get a pulse, Dee Ann! I don’t think he’s breathing! She’d placed two fingers on the inside of her husband’s wrist, just the way I’d seen nurses perform this procedure. Suddenly, she began pressing on Floyd’s chest and lifting his arms in some strange version of CPR.

After a minute of this, she paused and leaned over the recliner. Floyd, Floyd, can you hear me? she shouted in her husband’s ear. Evidently, she was ignoring the half-open eyes.

Miss Josie, have you called for an ambulance? I thought we needed a hearse, but I wasn’t going to suggest that. I was trying to be a calm, steady influence, although to tell the truth, I wanted to flee the house screaming. I’d never seen a dead person—well, not before the funeral home did its business on the corpse.

I did. I did. Willie, run down to the road and make sure the ambulance driver doesn’t miss the house. Willie shot out the door, glad, no doubt, to be out of the room. Miss Josie began to sway a little, so I plunked Heather down on the red-plaid sofa, on the end farther from the recliner, and went to help her.

Come on, Miss Josie, sit down. There’s really nothing we can do until the ambulance gets here. I was pretty sure there was nothing anyone could do even when the ambulance did arrive, but that was best left unsaid.

Miss Josie let me lead her to the sofa where I sat her down beside Heather, who, bless her heart, had remained quiet and wide-eyed since we’d walked in. Miss Josie, who usually made a huge fuss over Heather, didn’t seem to notice the child was there.

I’ve told him and told him about those unfiltered Camel cigarettes he smokes all the time, she said. And, Lord knows, he needs to lose some weight. I’ve been fixing recipes out of that Get Fit cookbook, but do you think he’s eaten any of that healthy food? Oh no! He pushes it around his plate and then gets up and goes downtown to Ernie’s Grill where I’m sure he’s eating nothing but grease and sugar.

I’d already spied an ashtray full of cigarette butts perched on the arm of Floyd’s recliner. I’d also noticed an empty Pepsi bottle and what looked like the wrapper off a honey bun on the end table. I didn’t doubt Miss Josie’s assessment. She’d once worked as a nurse before marrying Floyd, but I don’t think anyone needs medical training to know a steady diet of cigarettes and junk food is a recipe for a poison pill, especially for a man in his early seventies.

I’m numb, Dee Ann. Absolutely numb. What am I going to do without my Floyd? Miss Josie began to wail just as I heard the siren of the approaching ambulance.

Chapter 2

Two husky paramedics jogging with a stretcher between them burst through the back door of the Powells’ house. On the count of three they lifted the immobile—in my opinion, dead—Floyd Powell off his recliner and plopped him on the gurney.

Just as they were attaching all sorts of wires to his chest, June Hill, her blue-rinsed hair in pink sponge curlers, sailed through the open door, declaring to her best friend of sixty years, I’m here, Josephine, I’m here. I heard the call go out on our emergency scanner and came just as quick as I could.

Oh, June, help me, help me! I’m just beside myself! Miss Josie’s wailing caused Heather to get off the couch and wrap herself around my leg. I lifted the child and turned her face into my shoulder. Wake up, Floyd, wake up! Miss Josie cried as she watched the paramedics trying to revive her husband.

Now Josephine Powell, you just get ahold of yourself. Carrying on is not going to help Floyd, Mrs. Hill said sternly. She glanced at the grim faces of the paramedics. I wondered if she’d noticed Floyd’s half-open eyes.

Why don’t you and I go in the kitchen while these young men do their job here? she said more gently as she helped Miss Josie to her feet. Mrs. Hill suddenly seemed to notice my presence. Dee Ann, honey, you don’t have to stay. Take Heather home. I’ll take care of Josephine.

Joe has always made fun of how bossy Mrs. Hill is. She’s gone down to the bank and given him a hard time about fees on her checking account or some such business. She’s also a member of our church, Saint James United Methodist, where she’s served as Sunday School Superintendent since the Kennedy Administration. I’ve heard she makes all the teachers sign for their supplies and has been known to fuss at any volunteer who arrives the least bit late to teach on Sunday morning. Joe calls her Sergeant Hill. Not to her face, of course.

On this traumatic Saturday morning, however, I was glad for every bossy bone in that woman’s body. I needed someone else to take charge so I could get out of that distressful room. Besides myself, I had Heather to think about. Who knew what that child was processing about the whole situation? I didn’t want her to be scarred for life by the morning’s events. I’d lived to be twenty-eight years old without witnessing a death while she was only three and part of such an unsettling event.

So, yes, ma’am, I was ready to leave. Call me if you need me, I said to the back of Mrs. Hill’s pink-curlered head. She had one arm wrapped around Miss Josie’s waist and was steering her out of the den. I moved to the door, but before I stepped out on the porch, like Lot’s wife in Genesis, I felt compelled to look back. The paramedics were feverishly working over Floyd’s body, but I could still see his glazed pupils through his half-open eyelids. I will carry the image of those lifeless eyes for a very long time.

I’d just reached the downstairs door to the apartment when I heard tires squeal in the driveway behind me. I whipped around to see a white-faced Joe Bulluck jump from the beat-up, faded red Jeep he drove to work at the bank as well as to the woods to hunt. We had become a two-car family since I’d started teaching, and Joe insisted I drive our Toyota Corolla, a smoother, more reliable ride.

Dee Ann, what’s going on? My normally easygoing husband was as frantic as I’d ever seen him. Are you and Heather okay? Why is the ambulance here? What’s happened? Joe had taken Heather from me while firing off these questions and was looking her over for possible injuries. Evidently it hadn’t occurred to him that if she were the one hurt, she wouldn’t be with me in the yard but surrounded by paramedics.

We’re fine, Joe. Other than being traumatized. I sniffed a little, thinking again of how he could’ve spared Heather and me from having to see a dead body if only he’d been home. It’s Floyd. I think he’s had a heart attack or stroke, and it doesn’t look good. I was with Miss Josie until June Hill got here. She’s in there with her now. I nodded toward the house.

Maybe I should go see if there’s anything I can do, Joe said, just as the paramedics stepped out the sliding back door, wheeling the stretcher between them. The sheet was pulled over Floyd’s head. I wasn’t surprised.

A dazed Miss Josie followed, supported by Mrs. Hill. As the paramedics heaved Floyd into the back of the ambulance, Joe ran to help Mrs. Hill with Miss Josie. With him holding her up on one side and Mrs. Hill on the other, they walked Miss Josie to Mrs. Hill’s dark-green Ford LTD and eased her in the back seat. They closed the door, and I saw Mrs. Hill speaking to Joe.

I’m going to drive these ladies to the hospital, Joe yelled to me across the yard as Mrs. Hill got in the back seat of her car next to Miss Josie. I’ll call as soon as I can. Since Mrs. Hill had parked right behind the ambulance, Joe pulled the car up in the driveway to let the paramedics out first. Then backing up, he followed. His orange hunting cap was still perched on his dark head of hair.

By himself in the front seat, he was one strange-looking chauffeur. Any other time, I would’ve laughed, but certainly not today. Through the back window, Mrs. Hill’s pink curlers bobbed as Miss Josie leaned against her. This time, the ambulance siren was silent. Not even the emergency lights were on.

Willie had been standing by the back porch as Floyd was loaded in the ambulance. He now limped over to me. Mr. Floyd done passed over, ain’t he, Dee Ann? I’d told Willie not to put Miss in front of my name, and I had a bright moment on an otherwise dark day when this time he’d remembered.

I think so, Willie. I think he’s with the Lord. And then for the first time since I’d seen Joe squealing tires on the drive, I wondered what on earth had brought him home before dark on a deer-hunting Saturday.

Chapter 3

Iwould certainly ask Joe to explain his middle-of-the-morning presence when he called me from the hospital—or the morgue. In all the time I’d known him, six years before we were married and now going on five years of marriage, I couldn’t remember a single Saturday when he’d come home early from the woods during deer season.

Even when we began dating in high school—when you’d think he’d want to make a good impression—Joe never picked me up to go to the movies in time for the early show. We’d always have to catch the nine o’clock, and then half the time Joe would fall asleep in the theater since he’d been in the cold woods since five that morning.

Hunting was something the men in his family took seriously, too seriously in my opinion. His mother and aunts just laughed about being deer widows, but I failed to find the humor in a husband who went missing every Saturday from the first of October to the end of December.

So something important had brought Joe home early from hunting, but I’d have to wait to find out. In the meantime, I was worried about Willie. He was no spring chicken, and I was afraid the shock of witnessing Floyd’s collapse might cause him to keel over as well.

Can I take you home, Willie? I asked. There’s really no reason for you to stay here today. I had no idea where Willie resided or whether he lived with anyone, but I thought he needed to be somewhere other than Floyd Powell’s yard.

No, I need to stay right here, Willie answered. Miss Josie might want me for somethin’. I’ll just set over here under my tree. Willie hobbled over to the rickety aluminum outdoor chair under a huge weeping willow where he was used to resting while he waited for Miss Josie to think up chores for him. I hated to point out that Miss Josie would hardly be contemplating any yard work that day. I was pretty sure her day would be devoted to making funeral arrangements.

I decided to leave him alone. I could see his chair from my kitchen window and told myself I’d check on him in a few minutes. Meanwhile, Heather was getting heavy, and she didn’t want me to put her down. I figured once I got her upstairs in the apartment, she might be less clingy, or I could at least sit down with her. I could certainly understand her wanting to be held. I was pretty upset myself and wishing I had Joe home to hug me. I knew that was selfish since right then, Miss Josie needed him more.

The phone was ringing as I came in the door. Joe hadn’t had time to get to the hospital, but still I unreasonably hoped it was him.

Of course it wasn’t. Dee Ann, what’s happened at the Powells’? Mother heard the ambulance go by and saw it turning in their driveway. Edna Perry’s ear-splitting voice made me hold the phone a couple of inches from my ear.

Oh wonderful, I thought. Edna Perry taught English with me at the technical college. She was a good instructor but an even better gossip. I might as well take out a full-page ad in the Narrow Creek News and Views as tell her anything.

Floyd’s gone to the hospital. He had a little trouble breathing this morning, I fudged. I didn’t want Miss Josie to ever hear I’d been the source of announcing Floyd’s demise. I felt that declaration should come first from the family.

I wonder why Miss Josie sent for the ambulance instead of just taking him herself, Edna screeched. Mother said the siren was going, and she bet the driver was doing sixty in that thirty-five zone in front of her house.

I don’t know, I said vaguely. "I guess Miss Josie was erring on the side of caution. Sixty in a