A Bone To Pick

SIX

As I retrieved my Sunday paper from my seldom-used front doorstep, I could tell it was already at least 83 degrees. The paper predicted 98 for the day, and I thought its forecast was modest. My central air was already humming. I showered and reluctantly put my hair up in hot curlers, trying to bring order into chaos. I poured my coffee and ate breakfast (a microwaved sweet roll) while I burrowed through the news. I love Sunday mornings, if I get up early enough to really enjoy my paper. Though I have my limits: I will only read the society section if I think my mother will be in it, and I will not read anything about next season’s fashions. Amina Day’s mom owned a women’s clothing shop she had named Great Day, and I pretty much let her tell me what to buy. Under Mrs. Day’s influence I’d begun to weed out my librarian clothes, my solid-color interchangeable blouses and skirts. My wardrobe was a bit more diverse now.

The paper exhausted, I padded up the stairs and washed my glasses in the sink. While they dried, I squinted myopically into my closet. What was suitable for the girlfriend of the minister? Long sleeves sounded mandatory, but it was just too hot. I scooted hangers along the bar, humming tunelessly to myself. Shouldn’t the girlfriend of the minister be perky but modest? Though perhaps, at nearly thirty, I was a bit old to be perky.

For a dizzying moment I imagined all the clothes I could buy with my inheritance. I had to give myself a little shake to come back to reality and review my wardrobe of the here and now. Here we go! A sleeveless navy blue shirtwaist with big white flowers printed on it. It had a full skirt and a white collar and belt. Just the thing, with my white purse and sandals.

All dressed, with my makeup on, I popped on my glasses and surveyed the result. My hair had calmed down enough to be conventional, and the sandals made my legs look longer. They were hell to walk in, though, and my tolerance time for the high heels would expire right after church.

I walked as quickly as I safely could from my back door across the patio, out the gate in the fence around it, to the car under the long roof that sheltered all tenants’ cars. I unlocked the driver’s door and flung it open to let the heat blast escape. After a minute I climbed in, and the air conditioner came on one second after the motor. I had worked too hard on my appearance to arrive at the Episcopal church with sweat running down my face.

I accepted a bulletin from an usher and seated myself a carefully calculated distance from the pulpit. The middle-aged couple on the other end of the pew eyed me with open interest and gave me welcoming smiles. I smiled back before becoming immersed in figuring out the hymn and prayer book directions. A loud chord signaled the entrance of the priest, acolyte, lay reader, and choir, and I rose with the rest of the congregation.

Aubrey was just beautiful in his vestments. I drifted into an intoxicating daydream of myself as a minister’s wife. It felt very odd to have kissed the man conducting the service. Then I got too involved in managing the prayer book to think about Aubrey for a while. One thing about the Episcopalians, they can’t go to sleep during the service unless they’re catnappers. You have to get up and down too often, and shake people’s hands, and respond, and go up to the altar rail for communion. It’s a busy service, not a spectator sport like in some churches. And I believed I had been to every church in Lawrenceton, except maybe one or two of the black ones.

I tried to listen with great attention to Aubrey’s sermon, since I would surely have to make an intelligent comment later. To my pleasure, it was an excellent sermon, with some solid points about people’s business relationships and how they should conform to religious teachings, too, just as much as personal relationships. And he didn’t use a single sports simile! I kept my eyes carefully downcast when I went up to take communion, and tried to think about God rather than Aubrey when he pressed the wafer into my hand.

As we were folding up our kneelers, I saw one of the couples who had spoken to Aubrey while he and I were in line at the movies. They gave me a smile and wave, and huddled to talk to the man and woman with whom I’d been sharing a pew. After that, I was beamed on even more radiantly, and the movie couple introduced me to the pew couple, who asked me about twenty questions as rapidly as they could so they’d have the whole scoop on the pastor’s honey.

I felt like I was flying under false colors-we’d only had one date. I began to wish I hadn’t come, but Aubrey’d asked me, and I had enjoyed the service. It seemed now I had to pay for it, since there was no quick exit. The crowd had bottle-necked around the church door, shaking hands and exchanging small talk with Aubrey.

“What a good sermon,” I told him warmly, when it was finally my turn. My hand was taken in both of his for a moment, pressed and released. A smooth gesture, in one quick turn showing me I was special, yet not presuming too much.

“Thanks, and thanks for coming,” he said. “If you’re going to be home this afternoon, I’ll give you a call.”

“If I’m not there, just leave a message on my machine and I’ll call you back. I may have to go over to the house.”

He understood I meant Jane’s house, and nodded, turning to the old lady behind me in line with a happy “Hi, Laura! How’s the arthritis?”

Leaving the church parking lot, I felt a distinct letdown. I guess I had hoped Aubrey would ask me to Sunday lunch, a big social event in Lawrenceton. My mother always had me over to lunch when she was home, and I wondered, not for the first time, if she’d still want me to come over when she and John Queensland got back from their honeymoon. John belonged to the country club. He might want to take Mother out there.

I was so dismal by the time I unlocked my back door that I was actually glad to see the message light blinking on the answering machine.

“Hi, Roe. It’s Sally Allison. Long time no see, kiddo! Listen, what’s this I heard about you inheriting a fortune? Come have lunch with me today if this catches you in time, or give me a call when you can, we’ll set up a time.”

I opened the book to them’s, looked up Sally’s number, and punched the right buttons.

“Hello!”

“Sally, I just got your message.”

“Great! You free for lunch since your mom is still out of town?”

Sally knew everything.

“Well, yes, I am. What do you have in mind?”

“Oh, come on over here. Out of sheer boredom, I have cooked a roast and baked potatoes and made a salad. I want to share it with someone.”

Sally was a woman on her own, like me. But she was divorced, and a good fifteen years older.

“Be there in twenty minutes, I need to change. My feet are killing me.”

“Well, wear whatever you see when you open your closet. I have on my oldest shorts.”

“Okay, bye.”

I shucked off the blue and white dress and those painful sandals. I pulled on olive drab shorts and a jungle print blouse and my huaraches and pounded back down the stairs. I made it to Sally’s in the twenty minutes.

Sally is a newspaper reporter, the veteran of an early runaway marriage that left her with a son to raise and a reputation to make. She was a good reporter, and she’d hoped (a little over a year ago) that reporting the multiple murders in Lawrenceton would net her a better job offer from Atlanta; but it hadn’t happened. Sally was insatiably curious and knew everyone in town, and everyone knew that, to get the straight story on anything, Sally was the person to see. We’d had our ups and downs as friends, the ups having been when we were both members of Real Murders, the downs having mostly been at the same time Sally was trying to make a national, or at least regional, name for herself. She’d sacrificed a lot in that bid for a life in the bigger picture, and, when the bid hadn’t been taken up, she’d had a hard time. But now Sally was mending her fences locally, and was as plugged in to the Lawrenceton power system as she ever had been. If her stories being picked up by the wire services hadn’t gotten her out of the town, it had certainly added to her power in it.

I had always seen Sally very well dressed, in expensive suits and shoes that lasted her a very long time. When I reached her house, I saw Sally was a woman who put her money on her back, as the saying goes. She had a little place not quite as nice as Jane’s, in a neighborhood where the lawns weren’t kept as well. Her car, which hadn’t been washed in weeks, sat in dusty splendor uncovered by carport or garage. Getting in it would be like climbing in an oven. But the house itself was cool enough, no central air but several window air conditioners sending out an icy stream that almost froze the sweat on my forehead.

Sally’s hair was as perfect as ever. It looked like it could be taken off and put on without one bronze curl being dislodged. But instead of her usual classic suits, Sally was wearing a pair of cutoffs and an old work shirt.

“Girl, it’s hot!” she exclaimed as she let me in. “I’m glad I don’t have to work today.”

“It’s a good day to stay inside,” I agreed, looking around me curiously. I’d never been in Sally’s house before. It was obvious she didn’t give a damn about decor. The couch and armchairs were covered by throws that looked very unfortunate, and the cheap coffee table had rings on top. My resident manager’s eye told me that the whole place needed painting. But the bookcase was wonderfully stuffed with Sally’s favorite Organized Crime books, and the smell coming from the kitchen was delicious. My mouth watered.

Of course I was going to have to pay for my dinner with information, but it just might be worth it.

“Boy, that smells good! When’s it going to be on the table?”

“I’m making the gravy now. Come on back and talk to me while I stir. Want a beer? I’ve got some ice cold.”

“Sure, I’ll take one. It’s the ‘ice cold’ that does it.”

“Here, drink some ice water first for your thirst. Then sip the beer for your pleasure.”

I gulped down the glass of ice water and twisted the cap off the beer. Sally had put out one of those round plastic grippers without my even having to ask. I closed my eyes to appreciate the beer going down my throat. I don’t drink beer any other time of the year, but summer in the South is what beer was made for. Very cold beer. “Ooo,” I murmured blissfully.

“I know. If I didn’t watch out, I could drink a whole six-pack while I cooked.”

“Can I set the table or anything?”

“No, I already got everything done, I think. Soon as this gravy is ready-whoa, let me look at the biscuits-yep, they’re nice and brown-we’ll be ready to eat. Did I get the butter out?”

I scanned the table, which at least was a few feet from the stove. Sally must have been burning up over there.

“It’s here,” I reassured her.

“Okay, here we go. Roast, biscuits, baked potatoes, a salad, and for desert”-Sally took off a cake cover with a flourish-“red velvet cake!”

“Sally, you’re inspired. I haven’t had red velvet cake in ten years.”

“My mama’s recipe.”

“Those are always the best. You’re so smart.” A good southern compliment that could mean almost anything, but this time I meant it quite sincerely. I am not a person who often cooks whole meals for herself. I know single people are supposed to cook full meals, lay the table, and act like they had company, really-but how many single people actually do it? like Sally, when I cook a big meal, I want someone else to appreciate it and enjoy it.

“So, what’s this about you and the man of the cloth?”

Closing in for the kill already. “Sally, you need to wait till I’ve eaten something,” I said. Was the roast worth it?

“What?”

“Oh Sally, it’s really nothing. I’ve have one date with Aubrey Scott, we went to the movies. We had a nice time, and he asked me to come to the church today, which I did.”

“Did you now? How was the sermon?”

“Real good. He’s got brains, no doubt about it.”

“You like him?”

“Yes, I like him, but that’s it. What about you, Sally, are you dating anyone in particular?”

Sally was always so busy asking other people questions, she hardly ever got asked any herself. She looked quite pleased.

“Well, since you ask, I am.”

“Do tell.”

“This is gonna sound funny, but I’m dating Paul Allison.”

“Your husband’s brother?”

“Yes, that Paul Allison,” she said, shaking her head in amazement at her own folly.

“You take my breath away.” Paul Allison was a policeman, a detective about ten years older than Arthur-not much liked by Arthur or Lynn, if I remembered correctly. Paul was a loner, a man never married who did not join in the police force camaraderie with much gusto. He had thinning brown hair, broad shoulders, sharp blue eyes, and a suggestion of a gut. I had seen him at many parties I’d attended while I dated Arthur, but I’d never seen him with Sally.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“About five months. We were at Arthur and Lynn’s wedding, I tried to catch you then, but you left the church before I could. I didn’t see you at the reception?”

“I had the worst headache, I thought I was starting the flu. I just went on home.”

“Oh, it was just another wedding reception. Jack Burns had too much to drink and wanted to arrest one of the waiters he remembered having brought in before on drug charges.”

I was even more glad I’d missed it now.

“How’s Perry?” I asked reluctantly, after a pause. I was sorry to bring poor, sick Perry up, but courtesy demanded it.

“Thanks for asking,” she said. “So many people don’t even want to, because he’s mentally sick instead of having cancer or something. But I do want people to ask, and I go see him every week. I don’t want people to forget he’s alive. Really, Roe, people act like Perry’s dead because he’s mentally ill.”

“I’m sorry, Sally.”

“Well, I do appreciate your asking. He’s better, but he’s not ready to get out yet. Maybe in two more months. Paul’s been going with me to see Perry the past three or four times.”

“He must really love you, Sally,” I said from my heart.

“You know,” she said, and her face brightened, “I really think he does! Bring your plate over, I think everything’s ready.”

We served ourselves from the stove, which was fine with me. Back at the table, we buttered our biscuits and said our little prayer, and dug in like we were starving.

“I guess,” I began after I had told Sally how good everything was, “that you want to hear about Jane’s house.”

“Am I as transparent as all that? Well, I did hear something, you know how gossip gets around, and I thought you would rather me ask you and get it straight than let all this talk around town get out of hand.”

“You know, you’re right. I would rather you get it right and get it out on the gossip circuits. I wonder who’s started the talk?”

“Uh, well…”

“Parnell and Leah Engle,” I guessed suddenly.

“Right the first time.”

“Okay, Sally. I am going to give you a gossip exclusive. There’s no way this could be a story in the paper, but you see everyone in town, and you can give them the straight scoop from the horse’s mouth.”

“I am all ears,” Sally said with a perfectly straight face.

So I told her an amended and edited account. Leaving out the cash amount, of course.

“Her savings, too?” Sally said enviously. “Oh, you lucky duck. And it’s a lot?”

Glee rolled over me suddenly as it did every now and then when I forgot the skull and remembered the money. I nodded with a canary-full grin.

Sally closed her eyes in contemplation of the joy of having a lot of money all of a sudden.

“That’s great,” she said dreamily. “I feel good just knowing someone that’s happened to. Like winning the lottery.”

“Yeah, except Jane had to die for me to get it.”

“My God, girl, she was old as the hills anyway.”

“Oh, Sally, Jane wasn’t so old as people go nowadays. She was in her seventies.”

“That is plenty old. I won’t last so long.”

“I hope you do,” I said mildly. “I want you to make me some more biscuits sometimes.”

We talked some more about Paul Allison, which seemed to make Sally quite happy. Then I asked her about Macon Turner, her boss.

“I understand he’s seeing my new maybe-neighbor, Carey Osland,” I said casually.

“They are hot and heavy and have been,” Sally said, with a wise nod. “That Carey is really appealing to the opposite sex. She has had quite a dating-and marriage-history.”

I understood Sally exactly. “Really?”

“Oh, yes. First she was married to Bubba Sewell, back when he was nothing, just a little lawyer right out of school. Then that fell through, and she married Mike Osland, and by golly one night he goes out to get diapers and never comes home. Everyone felt so sorry for her when her husband left, and, having been in something of the same position, I did feel for her. But at the same time, I think he might have had some reason to take off.”

My attention sharpened. A number of instant scenarios ran through my head. Carey’s husband kills Carey’s lover, then flees. The lover could have been Mark Kaplan, the Rideouts’ vanished tenant, or some unknown. Or maybe Mike Osland could be the skull, reduced to that state by Carey’s lover or Carey.

“But she has a little girl at home,” I said in the interest of fairness.

“Wonder what she tells that little girl when she has overnight company?” Sally helped herself to more roast.

I disliked this turn of the conversation. “Well, she was very nice to me when she came over to welcome me to the neighborhood,” I stated, flatly enough to end that line of conversation. Sally shot me a look and asked if I wanted more roast.

“No thanks,” I said, giving a sigh of repletion. “That was so good.”

“Macon really has been more agreeable at the office since he began dating Carey,” Sally said abruptly. “He started seeing her after his son went away, and it just helped him deal with it a lot. Maybe Carey having somebody leave her, she was able to help Macon out.”

“What son?” I didn’t remember Mother mentioning any son during the time she’d dated Macon.

“He has a boy in his late teens or early twenties by now, I guess. Macon moved here after he got divorced, and the boy moved here with him, maybe seven years ago now. After a few months, the boy-his name was Edward, I think-anyway, he decided he was just going to take some savings his mother had given him and take off. He told Macon he was going to India or some such place, to contemplate or buy drugs or something. Some crazy thing. Of course, Macon was real depressed, but he couldn’t stop him. The boy wrote for a while, or called, once a month… but then he stopped. And Macon hasn’t seen hide nor hair of that child since then.”

“That’s terrible,” I said, horrified. “Wonder what happened to the boy?”

Sally shook her head pessimistically. “No telling what could happen to him wandering by himself in a country where he didn’t even speak the language.”

Poor Macon. “Did he go over there?”

“He talked about it for a while, but when he wrote the State Department they advised him against it. He didn’t even know where Edward had been when he disappeared…Edward could have wandered anywhere after he wrote the last letter Macon got. I remember someone from the embassy there went to the last place Edward wrote from and, according to what they told Macon, it was sort of a dive with lots of Europeans coming and going, and no one there remembered Edward, or at least that’s what they were saying.”

“That’s awful, Sally.”

“Sure is. I think Perry being in the mental hospital is better than that, I really do. At least I know where he is!”

Incontrovertible truth.

I stared into my beer bottle. Now I’d heard of one more missing person. Was a part of Edward Turner’s last remains in my mother’s pink blanket bag? Since Macon told everyone he’d heard from the boy since Edward had left, Macon would have to be the guilty one. That sounded like the end of a soap opera. “Tune in tomorrow for the next installment,” I murmured. “It is like a soap,” Sally agreed. “But tragic.” I began my going-away noises. The food had been great, the company at least interesting and sometimes actually fun. Sally and I parted this time fairly pleased with each other.

After I left Sally’s I remembered I had to check on Madeleine. I stopped at a grocery and got some cat food and another bag of cat litter. Then I realized this looked like permanency, rather than a two-week stay while the Engles vacationed in South Carolina.

I seemed to have a pet.

I was actually looking forward to seeing the animal.

I unlocked the kitchen door at Jane’s with my free hand, the other one being occupied in holding the bags from the grocery. “Madeleine?” I called. No golden purring dictator came to meet me. “Madeleine?” I said less certainly.

Could she have gotten out? The backyard door was locked, the windows still shut. I looked in the guest bedroom, since the break-in bad occurred there, but the new window was still intact.

“Kitty?” I said forlornly. And then it seemed to me I heard a noise. Dreading I don’t know what, I inched into Jane’s bedroom. I heard the strange mew again. Had someone hurt the cat? I began shaking, I was so sure I would find a horror. I’d left the door to Jane’s closet ajar, and I could tell the sound was coming from there. I pulled the door open wide, with my breath sucked in and my teeth clenched tight.

Madeleine, apparently intact, was curled up on Jane’s old bathrobe, which had fallen to the bottom of the closet when I was packing clothes. She was lying on her side, her muscles rippling as she strained.

Madeleine was having kittens.

“Oh hell,” I said. “Oh-hell hell hell.” I slumped on the bed despondently. Madeleine spared me a golden glare and went back to work. “Why me, Lord?” I asked self-pityingly. Though I had to concede it looked like Madeleine would be saying the same thing if she could. Actually, this was rather interesting. Would Madeleine mind if I watched? Apparently not, because she didn’t hiss or claw at me when I sat on the floor just outside the closet and kept her company.

Of course Parnell Engle had been fully aware of Madeleine’s impending motherhood, hence his merriment when I’d told him Madeleine could stay with me.

I pondered that for a few seconds, trying to decide if Parnell and I were even now. Maybe so, for Madeleine had had three kittens already, and there seemed to be more on the way.

I kept telling myself this was the miracle of birth. It sure was messy. Madeleine had my complete sympathy. She gave a final heave, and out popped another tiny, slimy kitten. I hoped two things: that this was the last kitten and that Madeleine didn’t run into any difficulties, because I was the last person in the world who could offer her any help. After a few minutes, I began to think both my hopes had been fulfilled. Madeleine cleaned the little things, and all four lay there, occasionally making tiny movements, eyes shut, about as defenseless as anything could be.

Madeleine looked at me with the weary superiority of someone who has bravely undergone a major milestone. I wondered if she were thirsty; I got her water bowl and put it near her, and her food bowl, too. She got up after a moment and took a drink but didn’t seem too interested in her food. She settled back down with her babies and looked perfectly all right, so I left her and went to sit in the living room. I stared at the bookshelves and wondered what in hell I would do with four kittens. On a shelf separate from those holding all the fictional and nonfictional murders, I saw several books about cats. Maybe that was what I should dip into next.

Right above the cat shelf was Jane’s collection of books about Madeleine Smith, the Scottish poisoner, Jane’s favorite. All of us former members of Real Murders had a favorite or two. My mother’s new husband was a Lizzie Borden expert. I tended to favor Jack the Ripper, though I had by no means attained the status of Ripperologist.

But Jane Engle had always been a Madeleine Smith buff. Madeleine had been released after her trial after receiving the Scottish verdict “Not Proven,” wonderfully accurate. She had almost certainly poisoned her perfidious former lover, a clerk, so she could marry into her own respectable upper-middle-class milieu without the clerk’s revealing their physical intimacy. Poison was a curiously secret kind of revenge; the hapless L’Angelier had deceived himself that he was dealing with an average girl of the time, though the ardency of her physical expressions of love should have proved to him that Madeleine had a deep vein of passion. That passion extended to keeping her name clean and her reputation intact. L’Angelier threatened to send Madeleine’s explicit love letters to her father.

Madeleine pretended to effect a reconciliation, then slipped arsenic into L’Angelier’s cup of chocolate.

For lack of anything better to do, I pulled out one of the Smith books and began to flip through it. It fell open right away. There was a yellow Post-it note stuck to the top of the page.

It said, in Jane’s handwriting, I didn’t do it.