Pushing Up Daisies

CHAPTER 11

The woman sat at the first table near the long picture window in the Paradise Diner. From there you could see the lake and what ever wildlife happened to be visiting, but she ignored the view, concentrating instead on unwrapping her shawl so that it didn’t graze the sticky condiments on the tiny pedestal table. She looked around frequently, as if expecting someone.

I motioned for Babe to come down to my end of the counter. “Do you know the woman in the corner?”

“Never seen her before.”

“That’s her-that’s the woman I met at the house!” I hoped I was whispering, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Go across the street and get O’Malley,” Lucy said to me. “I’ll check her out.” She grabbed a menu and a pad, as if to take the woman’s order.

I pretended to go to the ladies’ room but dashed out the side door, across the street, and up the stairs to the police station, nearly getting creamed by an SNET truck in the process. O’Malley watched through the mini blinds.

“I could ticket you for jaywalking, you know.”

“She’s there,” I said breathlessly, pointing to the diner.

“Who’s where?” he said casually.

“The woman I saw at the Peacock house is across the street at the Paradise. I thought you were a cop. Are you guys really cops,” I said, looking around, exasperated, “or am I channeling an old Barney Miller episode? Where’s the Asian guy who looked like Robert Mitchum?”

“Calm down,” he said, leading me to a small private office in the rear of the station. The other cops looked amused. “She was just in here to make a statement,” he told me, closing the door. “I didn’t realize we had to notify you every time we interviewed someone.”

I sat on the sofa, refusing the coffee he offered me. “Outburst over?”

“Can you at least tell me what she said?” I asked.

“Why don’t you ask her yourself? Ms. Gibson’s a lovely woman. C’mon, I’ll walk you back.”

He gripped my arm as we walked down the steps and crossed the street to the diner. “Now you’ve got me jaywalking. You’re a bad influence, aren’t you?”

Babe and Lucy looked up as we came in.

“That’s right, Officer. Paula ran out before paying her bill. You gonna lock her up?”

I looked around. The lunchtime crowd was going strong, but the mystery woman was gone. Lucy gave O’Malley the once- over.

“Maybe I’ll get her to perform a little community service,” O’Malley said. “I need to determine whether or not she’s a repeat offender first,” he added, somewhat suggestively.

“I love it when people talk about me as if I’m not here.” I pulled my arm away from his.

I rejoined Lucy at the counter, where my untouched turkey sandwich was still sitting.

“Go ahead,” Lucy said, motioning to the sandwich. “Eat. Babe and I will fill you in. That was Hillary Gibson. Her identity was confirmed by her old sweetie, Gerald Fraser, your new diner buddy and, coincidentally, the person she was waiting for. Here are her numbers,” she said triumphantly. She wiggled a slip of paper in the air and handed it to me with no small mea sure of satisfaction.

“You almost got away with the sneaky exit, but that truck driver had a few choice words for you which we all couldn’t help but hear.” She pointed to a lummox hunched over a mountain of food. “He’s over there. I’m sure he’d be happy to repeat them.”

“Maybe later.”

“Anyway, Hillary decided this might not be the best place for a quiet tкte-а- tкte with the old flame, so they split. She said you could call her. They did drop one piece of news you should find interesting. Hillary and Gerald don’t think the baby belongs to either of the sisters, and do you know why?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said.

“I’m not sure we should have this conversation here in the diner,” Mike said.

“We’ve already had some of it,” Lucy continued. “They were both very fond of Dorothy and Renata, and they’re concerned that people are thinking the worst of the two women. Which is a hell of a lot worse than the truth.”

I’d been on the receiving end of Lucy’s dramatic reconstructions since we were fifteen and knew this could take a while. Besides, I thought I knew where she was going. I took a bite of my sandwich during her pregnant pause. Pete the cook had struck again; tough as shoe leather.

I swallowed hard and put down the sandwich. “They weren’t sisters, were they? Babe, can I have a little Russian dressing on the side? Fat- free, if you have.”

“Would you mind repeating that?”

“Russian dressing. Fat-free?”

She gave me her are- you- kidding look, and handed me a paper cup of gelatinous orange goop, then just stared.

“All right, Miss Marple, how did you know?” O’Mal-ley asked.

“No, no, no, no, nooo, too old,” I said, referring to the nickname. “Try again.” I dipped a tiny corner of my sandwich into the orange goop. I remembered this stuff. It wasn’t as bad as it looked.

Now I was milking it. If this wasn’t “Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with a knife,” it was damn close. Through the window, I could see Officer Guzman trying to get O’Malley’s attention. I let him know and reluctantly he got up to leave.

“To be continued,” he said.

As the door slammed behind him, Babe said, “He’s taken the bait. Now it’s just a matter of reeling him in, isn’t it?”

“I told you, I’m not interested in him. Not in that way.”

There may have been people who wanted more coffee, or their checks, but Babe wasn’t moving. “Talk,” she said.

“Dorothy’s sister was christened Rose. She goes to visit Dorothy in Italy and returns calling herself Renata. That alone might have been a tip- off, but the locals apparently considered it a youthful affectation.”

“She was so taken by all things Italian, she was reborn. I can dig it,” Babe said. “After my first trip to Mexico, I called myself Juanita for months.”

“And it was hardly the hot issue in 1934,” I added. “Their parents had died; people were just glad she wasn’t closing the family business. You guys ever hear of the Depression?”

Even more telling were the clippings I’d found at the Ferguson Library. Although similar, the faded images of Renata, before and after the trip to Italy, seemed to reveal two different personalities. Before the trip, the younger sister could always be seen with a big crooked smile, hanging on to her older sister’s hand or watching lovingly from the sidelines. After they returned, there were fewer photographs. And Rose/Renata always seemed to have her face turned from the camera or covered by a heavy veil or shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat.

“Maybe she was just growing up and at an awkward age, or maybe she didn’t want to be photographed,” I said. “And all the trips, the secrecy, the mysterious illness?” I continued. “What ever it was, I wouldn’t mind getting it-she lived well into her eighties. I’m guessing it wasn’t Rose. It was a different woman, and she and Dorothy were lovers.”

“Well done,” Lucy said. “Hillary called it a Boston marriage; she didn’t elaborate. Why didn’t you say something?”

“It was just a guess. Besides, it wasn’t up to me to out them.”

“Well, they may have been gay, but it doesn’t mean one of them couldn’t have had a child,” Lucy said.

Babe broke in. “David Crosby’s not that old. We’re not talking Melissa Etheridge. We’re talking the love that dares not speak its name, not the love that gives interviews. Those days, straight or gay, women didn’t just go off and have babies on their own, even if they were financially in de pen dent enough to do it. It wasn’t so easy being a little different in the thirties and forties. Not that I was there, of course.”

“Either one of those women was raped-,” Babe continued.

“Or it really was someone else’s baby. And it’s sounding less like an indiscretion and more like a crime,” I added.