Poison Ivory
Authors: Tamar Myers
Poison Ivory
A Den of Antiquity Mystery
Snow in Charleston lasts less than half as long as…
There are times when life seems to unfold in slow…
Perhaps it was thanks to Greg, but Cheng and I…
The good news was that Buford is one of the…
I called Greg and told him about my unwanted visitor,…
My hunk of burning love keeps a schedule that is…
When The Singing Panda opened its doors, it was an…
When I returned to my shop I saw immediately that…
As a friend. One can never have too many friends,…
I wouldn’t characterize myself as the impatient sort, nor am…
Excuse me?”
There’s no need to confess anything, dear; I’ve already guessed.
What?” I cried in alarm
When I observed how moist Taiga’s hunk of German chocolate…
No project has ever proceeded smoothly from the tools of…
Are we expecting terrorists, Wynnell?” I asked.
Bravo!” Wynnell cried, clapping vigorously.
Was it my imagination, or did a cloud suddenly obscure…
Well, you see those humongous trucks that are all but…
Greg and Booger, bless their hearts, had not gone to…
My dilemma was whether or not to fill Mama in…
Mama! You just took ten years off my life?”
Sure enough, when the dust settled some, I could see…
Why don’t that beat all,” Mama said, in a temporary…
Mama listened obligingly for a second, then glommed onto to…
Ha! Such moxie! If you were about fifty years younger,…
Mr. Curly (aka Lord Bowfrey) was charged with two counts of…
S
now in Charleston lasts less than half as long as a politician’s promise. Therefore, if I wanted to walk in it, I knew I had better hurry. I shook my husband for the umpteenth time.
“Greg, darling, wake up.”
He groaned. “Maybe later, hon; now I just want to sleep.”
I couldn’t blame him. It was only two in the morning. I’d woken up to use the bathroom and was suddenly struck by the sound of complete silence that only a wet, heavy snow can deliver in the middle of a night. Not a dog was barking, not a car engine racing, not even a foghorn was sounding on the nearby harbor. The city of Charleston seemed to be holding its breath while this once-in-a-ten-year event unfolded.
Well, if my beloved husband wouldn’t join me for an outing in the snow, then maybe my mother would. After all, she is from the Upstate of South Carolina, where the cold stuff, while still unusual, falls at least once almost every winter.
“Mama! Wake up!”
Mozella Wiggins is a petite woman—just five feet tall—who has been stuck in a time warp since the early 1960s. She “retires” to bed in a proper nightgown, and lays a matching robe, neatly folded, across the foot of her bed. At the first sound of her name she sat up and reached for the robe in one smooth gesture.
“What is it, dear? Is it those shadows on the wall again?”
“Mama! I was six years old, and that willow oak branch was growing too close to the house. You said so yourself.”
My minimadre shook her head sharply, as if to clear her brain from layers of sand and dust that might have accumulated on it while she slept. Suddenly she was just as alert as a traffic controller fresh back from rehab.
“Listen, Abby!”
“Isn’t it wonderful, Mama?”
Her response was to rush to the window and fling open the solid wood plantation shutters. What she saw made her gasp in delight, and she began to jump up and down like an excited schoolgirl.
“Oh, Abby, we’ve got to get out there as fast as we can. We have to be the first ones to make tracks in the snow. It brings good luck, you know.”
“It does? Says who?”
“My mama and her mama before her, that’s who.”
“Who am I to argue with my foremothers? Do you have any waterproof shoes?” Mama wears only pumps—even to picnics.
“No. I was hoping you had an extra pair of galoshes.”
“Well, considering the fact that I’ve lived down here on the coast for the last five years, and it’s only snowed once, it’s somehow slipped my mind to stock up on them. Do you have a pair of old shoes that you absolutely hate?”
“Don’t be silly, dear; why would I buy something I hate?”
Sometimes with Mama one needs to tack, just as abruptly as one might with a sailboat. “Ah, but think of this as an opportunity to buy a new pair of shoes; my treat. Yesterday I saw a huge selection of pumps, with stiletto heels, in the window of Bob Ellis.”
“You mean you wouldn’t send me to Target?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Target, Mama—but yes, you may purchase”—one does not
buy—
“a pair of the statement shoes if you like.”
“Sold,” Mama said happily, and scurried off to her closet, where, without a second’s hesitation, she retrieved a pair of pull-on rubber boots in neon yellow.
“Mama, where’d you get those?”
“These are my snow-walking boots from up in Rock Hill. They’re from Target, you know. Anyway, I keep them hidden under my laundry bag, because the color doesn’t go with this room.”
“But you said you didn’t have anything!”
“You asked me about shoes, dear; you didn’t ask me about boots. Besides, remember all those times I called you up, when you were living in Charlotte, and asked you to come down and walk in the snow with me. If you had, you’d have remembered these.”
“Let me get this straight: you wanted me to drive down in the snow from Charlotte to Rock Hill, a distance of thirty miles, just so that I could walk in frozen precipitation with you?”
“You should be flattered, Abby. I could have asked any one of my many friends instead.”
It was time for me to shut up and stew quietly. There was simply no way to win an argument with Mama. If buying her a four hundred dollar pair of shoes from Bob Ellis on King Street was what it took to get her to walk with me, so be it. Mama was priceless. Plus, to be brutally honest, she might not live to see another snow as heavy as this one in Charleston.
The natives of Charleston woke up in a panic. Schools were closed, as were bridges, and meetings canceled. Folks descended on the grocery stores like locusts and cleaned the shelves out of bread and milk. But by noon that same day the sun was out and the temperature was in the mid-fifties. By two o’clock it was sixty degrees and there wasn’t a trace of snow, not even against the north sides of buildings.
I’d managed to get a little sleep after my joy walk with Mama, and was pumped when I ar
rived at my shop, the Den of Antiquity. I sell collectibles and antiques, by the way. Although my inventory now tends toward the high end, I still offer a broad enough range to please most of the discerning tourists—and locals—who wander in.
Okay, so that’s not quite true at the moment. A faltering economy, a weak dollar, and high gas prices: these are factors can hit a tourist-oriented town like Charleston particularly hard. A person can’t live without food, but a person can sure as shootin’ live without a Louis XIV chair with its gilded wood and Genoese velvet. One might say that business has been a mite slow lately—if one were given to understatement. Fortunately, I’d done well in the past, and had a sizable nest egg put aside. Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to last forever at the rate at which I’d been spending. I’d found that one gets accustomed to a certain standard of living, and that it is darn hard to cut out luxuries that somewhere along the line became needs.
“Good morning,” I said cheerily to my staff as I breezed in through the back entrance. “Are we ready to make this the best day ever?”
“In a pig’s eye,” Wynnell Crawford said. She’s my best buddy who followed me down from Charlotte with her husband Ed when I made the big move. No matter how sunny it is, Wynnell manages to find a couple of clouds in the sky; but the upside is that at least she gets a bit of shade and is less likely to wrinkle.
“Hey Abby,” Cheng said. “Why aren’t you out dishpanning?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You know: sledding down hills—except in a dishpan, not a sled. Back in Shelby we used to use washtubs and inner tubes, but you’re so small, Abby, you could fit in a dishpan with no trouble.”
“Thanks, Cheng—I think. But as you may have noticed, there aren’t any hills in the Lowcountry—certainly not in Charleston—except for the banks along highway interchanges.”
Instantly, I regretted having said that. Cheng hails from Shelby, North Carolina, which may be neither here nor there, but she has an imagination that makes Paul Bunyan seem like a dullard by comparison. Her large gray eyes grew even larger, and she licked the corners of her mouth.
“You just might have something there, Abby.”
“Uh, I don’t think so. If the highway patrol didn’t stop you first, you’d get hurt on the rocks and broken glass in the gullies. Nope, sledding down highway banks is not a good idea.”
“Ooh, Abby, you can be so silly. I’m thinking about buying up a hundred acres in Dorchester County while we can still get it relatively cheap. Then we bring down oodles of clay from the Upstate—since that’s all they have, and they hate it up there—and we create a man-made hill. Only we call it a mountain. Did you know that the highest point in Florida is only 345 feet?”
“I did not know that.” Cheng, by the way, has an IQ that is off the charts. Unfortunately, so is her sense of reality.
“Mississippi’s highest point is only 806 feet, but they call it Woodall
Mountain
. I figure that with the right underpinnings, we could build this baby at least that high. We could name it Mount Cheng, for instance—or, if you insist, Mount Abby. Although personally, the latter sounds a little strange to me.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“Cheng, you’re nuts,” Wynnell said kindly.
“You say that now, but just wait. Mount Cheng will pay for itself—ka-cheng—I mean, ka-ching!” The big galoot laughed heartedly. “You see, all we need to do is build a road to the top
and
a restaurant. People go crazy for a restaurant with a view, and this will have the best ocean view of any place along the East Coast, from the cliffs of Maine all the way to Key West. Think about it, Abby, the eastern coastal plain is as flat as a pancake, and then suddenly, halfway to Miami, out of nowhere, rises a giant hill with stunning panoramic views. It wouldn’t even matter what kind of food you sold; the restaurant would be packed.”
“Hmm,” I mused. With the right promotion behind this idea, and if we could get the Highway Department to approve a connecting route to I-95, Mount Abby might possibly become the next South of the Border. It might even surpass that, uh,
colorful
collection of shops as a tourist landmark.
Wynnell’s enormous brows met in on enormous hedge of disapproval. “It’ll never fly.”
“Why not, dear?”
“Why do you think there aren’t any significant landforms between here and New England?”
“Beats me.”
“I’m no expert—like Cheng here—but I’ll bet some of it has to do with hurricanes. The first Category Five to come through and Mount Cheng will be Molehill Cheng and your cash register will be twenty-five miles out to sea.”
“Hmm.”
Cheng stomped a foot the size of Delaware. “Abby, does Wynnell always have to be such a downer?”
“Stark raving mad,” Wynnell hissed, but in a kindly way, I’m sure.
I clapped my hands. “We have ten minutes until opening. Do we have any business items to review before then?”
“Oh yeah,” Cheng said, and scratched her oversized head to better help her think. “As soon as I let myself in there was a call for you from that guy at customs—you know, Pepe Peeyew. He said your shipment from Hong Kong arrived yesterday and you can come pick it up anytime.”
“Fantastic. Anyone want to come with?” Perhaps it was unfair to ask them to accompany me, as they do work on commission, but I hate going to the docks alone.
“Pass,” Wynnell said.
“Not today, thanks,” Cheng said.
“Are you ladies sure?”
“Shame on you, Abby,” Wynnell said. “You don’t like being hassled because you’re so darn attractive, so you want one of us to ugly it up a bit for you. I haven’t figured it out yet, but that’s like sexual harassment or something.”
“What?”
I pretended to be both shocked and insulted by my friend’s allegation.
“Hey,” Cheng said, “just what do you mean, Wynnell? I’m
much
younger than Abby, and I’ll have you know that there are plenty of men who prefer my type over hers. Abby’s way too short to be beautiful—no offense taken of course, Abby.”
“Of course. Well, In any case, I think I’ll go by myself today. Sometimes it’s nice to be alone with my thought.”
“Don’t you mean
thoughts
, Abby?”
“No, my head’s too small to accommodate more than one thought at a time.”
“But Abby,” Cheng said, “the dock is full of brawny men, some of whom might wish to have their way with you. While I wouldn’t add one iota of ugliness to your quota, I could definitely function as a bodyguard. Here, Abby, just feel my bicep.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.” There was no need; I’d seen Cheng single-handedly tote large dressers like they were blocks of marshmallow. The woman was as strong as an ox, as stubborn as a mule, and as loyal as a team of huskies. She was
just who I needed as a companion for my trip to the docks.
“Please, Abby, pretty please. With Granny Ledbetter’s homemade, foot-stomped molasses on top?”
“I guess so,” I said. “But give the molasses to Wynnell; she’s the one with the sweet tooth.”
“I’m going to get you for that,” Wynnell growled, but my friend was smiling.
The Port of Charleston is the nation’s fourth busiest container port. Even with Cheng along to navigate and read the plethora of signs, by the time we parked in an approved spot and found the right gate, I was a four foot nine inch bundle of raw nerves. Cheng, however, was as calm as a goat in a clover field.
“Whatcha here for?” The man’s badge read wilson curly, despite the fact there was not a hair on his head.
I showed Mr. Curly my papers. He read them carefully, checked them against a list, and then engaged in a mumbled phone call with his back turned to us. Finally he addressed me again.
“ID, please.”
“You mean like my driver’s license? Usually I don’t show my importer’s license until I get to the customs shed.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“If that’s true, ma’am, then whoever was on duty wasn’t doing his job. Wait right here, please.”
He strode away, disappearing behind a gray concrete building to our immediate right.
“What a nice fellow,” I said.
“You really think so, Abby? If he doesn’t ask me out, I might just do the Lazy Mae and ask him out myself.”
It took me a second. “Don’t you mean ‘Daisy Mae,’ as in the dance?”
Cheng giggled. “You’re always so silly, Abby—but clever too, the way you’re always coming up with new words and phrases. But seriously, the Lazy Mae dances got their start back in Shelby. Mae’s full name was Norma Mae Ida Lupine Madrigot Heising—only she couldn’t be bothered to use even Norma, much less the other names.
“Anyway, she was really forward for her time, and not at all afraid of asking the boys to dance with her, but she was the laziest girl you ever did see. So her daddy built her a little platform on wheels that she could stand on while the boys pushed her around on the gym floor. Sometimes they pushed too hard and Lazy Mae fell off; that’s where the expression ‘pushover’ comes from.”
“How very illuminating,” I said.
“Would you like to know how the phrase ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’ got started?”
“Some other time, perhaps.”
Much to my relief I could see churlish Mr. Curly turn the corner. With him were two security guards. I glanced around to see what interesting spectacle I might be missing.
