“From what my mama told me, he was,” Melba said. “But they stayed married, even if he did run around on her. She got paid back for running out on her son like that.”

“They sound like such lovely people,” I said, my tone sour. I had no respect for men who behaved like that. Or for women who ran off and left their children for some man. I didn’t know all the details, so I could be misjudging Rick and Godfrey’s mama, but still.

“Mrs. Tackett, as she was then, was the organist at her church, and her sister was the preacher’s wife. That sure caused some talk.”

“I guess Peyton Place had nothing on Athena,” I said.

“Not then, or now,” Melba said. “People don’t change that much. They’re always gonna get themselves into all kinds of messes.”

“I guess so,” I said. “But what I have to wonder is, could one of those messes be related to Godfrey’s death? What about Rick, for example?”

“Like I said, I don’t think he and Godfrey ever had much to do with each other. I never heard that they did, anyway. Rick, though, has had a pretty hard life.”

“I don’t really know anything about him,” I said, knowing that Melba would fill in the details.

“For one thing, he was in Vietnam, right at the tail end of the war, and the Lord only knows how that affected him,” Melba said, the pity obvious in her voice. “Old Mr. Tackett was a hard man, they say. He was a farmer, and you know that’s not an easy life. Rick worked on the farm until he was old enough to enlist in the army.”

“Couldn’t wait to get away, probably,” I said. “That’s what it sounds like.”

“Probably,” Melba said. “Rick’s been married a couple of times too, and has three kids, I think.” She paused for a moment. “Yeah, three. Two boys and a girl. He had another daughter, though, but she died when she was only nine or ten.”

“That’s awful,” I said. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than the death of one’s child.

“She had some kind of cancer,” Melba said. “They took her to St. Jude in Memphis, and I reckon they did everything they could for her. But they couldn’t save her.”

“Poor Rick,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s had a hard row to hoe all his life,” Melba said. “And there’s his half brother, rich as all get out from his books, and Rick struggling to raise his family and get them through school.”

“Godfrey probably never did a thing to help them,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Godfrey being that charitable. Of course, Rick might not have wanted anything from his brother.