The Rib King: a Novel by Ladee Hubbard

Author:Ladee Hubbard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

Jennie Williams, the Maid

1924

Some of our so-called society people regard the Stage as a place to be ashamed of. Whenever it is my good fortune to meet such persons, I sympathize with them for I know they are ignorant as to what is really being done in their own behalf by members of their race on the Stage.

—AIDA OVERTON WALKER

7

Return of the King

Jennie Williams was hurrying down Central Avenue one morning, on her way to an appointment, when she happened to look up and see Mr. Sitwell’s likeness hanging from a telephone pole. He was wearing a chef’s cap, grinning beneath the caption, “You’ve tasted the sauce, now meet the man!” and a small drawing of a jewel-encrusted crown like the one on the cans of Rib King sauce they sold down at Schweggmann’s Market. She hadn’t seen the man in ten years, not since the night he poisoned the Barclays’ dessert then set fire to the house, killing everyone inside it, save by some miracle Jennie herself. And this wasn’t the wanted poster it by all rights should have been, but rather an advertisement for a series of cooking demonstrations he was giving that weekend at the Fowler Hotel.

It rattled her nerves. The thought of that lunatic not just coming back, but having the audacity to actually advertise it in the middle of downtown. She knew someone else had been blamed for his crimes, but a part of her always had a hard time accepting how someone could do something that crazy to that many people and not get caught. Made the world seem not just capricious and cruel but cunning. If people with the power and influence of the Barclays couldn’t survive it, then what chance did someone like Jennie have? Because she hadn’t even seen it coming. She’d worked with Sitwell for months in that house and not once had it occurred to her that he might be capable of such a thing. In fact, if things had gone a different way—if she hadn’t been there that night, hadn’t seen him prepare those cakes, and then if he had been arrested and she’d found herself called to testify—that’s exactly what she would have said: “Mr. Sitwell could have never killed those people. He’s honest, loyal, and just about the most decent man I’ve ever known.” She would have been telling the truth and she would have been wrong.

But of course she never was called to testify because somehow Mr. Sitwell managed to do all that without ever being considered a suspect. The police had decided that the Barclay murders were a “white man’s crime,” a determination reached not so much because of the fire as the fact that it had been preceded by the use of two separate poisons, a nonfatal soporific added to the servants’ soup and a lethal dosage of an entirely different substance added to the Barclays’ dessert. This implied the type of intelligence, forethought, and horticultural knowledge that investigators attributed to an Anglo-Saxon mind.

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