Soup...Er...Myrtle!: A Myrtle Crumb Mystery (Myrtle Crumb Mystery Series) by Gayle Trent Page B

hurt
herself, and I’ll feel so guilty I won’t be able to stand it.
    I hurried upstairs and threw on some
jeans and a thick sweater. I took my time with my makeup. That little Bobbi
Brown wrote a book telling aging women how to do their makeup. I have a copy of
it, and it’s what I go by. I don’t need the book so much anymore, but I go back
and look at it every now and then to refresh my memory. One of Bobbi’s
important tips was to fill in your eyebrows. Old naked eyebrows and cakey
powder age you like nobody’s business.
    After I got my face fixed, I put my
boots on and went out and started the car. That ice seemed half an inch thick.
It would likely take more than five minutes.
    I went back inside and turned on the
TV so I could see the weather before I left. They said on the news it wasn’t
supposed to get above thirty-eight degrees today, which was pretty good for
January in Southwest Virginia but still awfully cold.
     
    * * *
     
    Bettie had been right about one thing—Doris
Phillips had met me at the door just tickled pink to have a little help and
more than willing to show me the ropes. Doris was a sweet little woman…short…a
tad on the chubby side, which made her look like a mischievous schoolgirl when
she was grinning and those hazel eyes of hers were sparkling.
    “Am I the first one here?” I asked.
“Besides you, I mean.”
    “You are,” Doris said. “And I sure
am glad to have you. I have a couple of other volunteers, but you’re the only
M.E.L.O.N. coming in today. Bettie said she’d stagger it so that I’ll have
somebody helping out all week.”
    “Well, that’s good. I catch on
pretty quick. Just show me what you need me to do.”
    “Come on back,” she said.
    I followed Doris into the kitchen.
There were three big stockpots on the stove.
    Doris nodded toward them. “Today
we’re serving tomato, vegetable beef, and potato soups. Would you care to make
the cornbread?”
    “Not at all,” I told her. I make
awfully good cornbread, if I do say so myself.
    “Thank you. Everything you’ll need
is either in the refrigerator or in that cupboard over top of the microwave.”
She got a pan of biscuits out of the oven and put it on a wire rack beside
another pan she had cooling. “The oven’s already hot for you. I’ll be in the
dining room getting the tables ready if you need me.”
    The kitchen was tidy. Doris did a
good job of keeping it stocked too.
    The food bank and soup kitchen
aren’t directly affiliated with our church, but the church does a lot to
support it. Doris and her husband Frank started the operation when they
realized there were more homeless people in and around Backwater than any of us
had ever dreamed. I’d always thought that homelessness was a big city thing. I
mean, I knew we had poor people…just not to that extent.
    And as I stood in that kitchen
mixing up the cornbread, I was thinking we’d have enough to send everybody off
with a care package, especially after Doris popped her head in and asked me to
make three skillets of cornbread. But after folks started filing in, I got
afraid we wouldn’t have enough.
    Now, some of the people who came
through that line were big old dirty, lazy-looking people. They acted like it
was all they could do to shuffle one foot in front of the other. And, before
anybody gets up on their high horse and tells me that I didn’t know those
people and that maybe they had some kind of condition, I saw them. The
only conditions they had were filth, greed, and laziness. If it hadn’t been for
me and Doris, they’d have ate up everything before the people that truly needed
it even got through the line.
     And, trust me, you could tell
the ones that really needed this food. One woman and her two little girls
nearly broke my heart. She was young herself, and the girls were both under the
age of five or else they’d have been in school. The oldest one looked like she
was getting close to school age, so I reckoned her to be about