The Glass Is Always Greener (20 page)

Chapter 28

Y
ou lost her, didn’t you?”

“No! Of course not! Why would you say that?”

“Then where is she?”

“With the rest of the family—over by the gravesite.”

“Then I don’t get it. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is— Abby, I need to sit down. May I get in?”

“By all means.” I threw my handbag in the backseat.

“Ow!”

“
Mama?
” I shrieked. Trust me, being surprised from behind by another person is even worse when it happens in a cemetery.

“That’s my name, dear; just don’t wear it out. Abby, that thing hurt like the dickens!”

“I’m sorry, Mama—no, I’m not.” I’d unbuckled my seat belt and was on my knees confronting the maxi-me. She wasn’t bleeding that I could see. “Did I hit you in the eye?”

“No, you hit my shoulder, thank goodness. But you could have hit my eye.”

“Well, I’m glad I hit your shoulder. How long have you been sitting there?”

“Too long; I thought that service would never be over.”

“How did you get here—to the temple, I mean?”

“Well, if you must know, after you so rudely ducked out on our lunch, I decided to date Ben; he drove me. But my goodness, look around, will you? Apparently Rob’s aunt was a popular woman.”

“At least she knew a lot of people,” I said. I felt my lungs compress as the air was sucked out of them. “What do you
mean
that you’ve decided to date him? You can’t, Mama. He’s your own age and entirely normal; it would be unseemly. What kind of Charleston eccentric dates a normal man?”

“Oh, Abby, I’ve never been happier.”

“Does Ben know that you’re dating him?”

“He will soon enough, dear,” she trilled.

“Oy vey,” Bob said. “Abby, I can see it now; you and I will be in-laws.”

“So anyway,” Mama said, “since this is my car, I thought we’d carpool.”

“Thanks for the heads-up, Mama,” I said, still grousing. “But what gives? Why aren’t you sticking with the new love of your life? Every funeral has its widow snatchers—you know, folks who prey on the bereaved. And handsome brothers fall into that category. Some lithe young thing with fake blond hair is liable to put the moves on Ben right there at the gravesite; some women aren’t above that, and you know it.”

“Don’t answer, Mozella,” Bob said. “It’s my turn to talk first.”

“That’s right, Mama. We have a non-escaped killer on our hands.”

“Don’t be so jocular, Abby,” Bob snapped.

“I’m not,” I said, quite taken aback by his outburst. “I’m merely cynical. I get like this every time a gun gets pulled on me.”

Mama, bless her heart, didn’t say a word. She’s been through the wringer with me enough times to know that as long as I’m still standing (or even sitting upright, and flapping my gums), she has all she needs to know for the time being.

“In that case,” Bob said, “be prepared to get even more cynical. Do you hear a police siren right now?”

“Yes. But I must say it’s awfully early in the schedule of events for that. Chanti was going to wait until it was all over, but half the entourage has yet to arrive.”

“That’s because it’s Ben who the police are taking away.”

“Say what?”

“The four siblings rode over in the same limo—no spouses—and on the way over Chanti fed them some version of the story, and then—Abby, you’re going to love this—Ben, being the loving brother that he is, offered to take the rap for her.”

“What the heck?”

“Yeah, isn’t that a bummer? But it gets better; he did so because he has prostate cancer and is afraid of chemo, and figures that sooner rather than later, the state isn’t going to want to keep a dying old man incarcerated just because he didn’t take measures to prolong his sister’s life.”

“And she told you this?”

“As soon as we got there, she dragged me away from Rob and told me the real deal. She also said that if I ever as much as hint to Rob that she had anything to do with her sister’s untimely death, she will string me up by my cojones, after which she will tell Rob how I assaulted her in her kitchen. Abby, did you know that she has a security camera in every room, and that she can edit the tapes?”

“No, and I don’t believe her.”

I felt Mama’s soft hand on my shoulder. “Whatever this is about,” she said, “I think you should both sleep on it before deciding your next course of action.”

One of the things that has really disappointed me in life is the discovery that what little wisdom I’ve managed to accumulate for the years has been of interest to no one. Not once has anyone positioned himself or herself at my feet and begged for a pearl of wisdom. What’s more, the pearls that I’ve thrown at my children in passing (they were running to avoid them) rolled off them like water off the back of an Alaskan duck.

Maybe things will change, given more time. I say this because I am just now realizing that Mama may possess a smidgen of wisdom. A pinch of perspective. At the very least, she is so much smarter now than she was when I was a teenager. If Mama advised waiting, then that’s what I would do.

“Mama’s right,” I heard myself say. “We’ll sleep on it for now.”

“But Abby,” Bob protested, “the woman’s demonic. You saw how she behaved when she had the gun. We have to find some way to tell Rob!”

“For now is not forever,” Mama said quietly.

“Has anyone seen C.J.?” I asked.

Mama, Bob, and Wynnell all shook their heads in the negative. It had been a strange supper at the Olive Garden in Pineville to say the least. Bob was furious at Rob for agreeing to stay at his mom’s overnight, and he was outraged that Chanti should have asked. His anger, of course, spilled over onto Mama and me, but being the polite sort, he expressed it by remaining mum.

“You know C.J.,” Wynnell said, with the wave of a breadstick. “She’s young and impetuous. By now she could be halfway to China.”

C.J. has always been like a second daughter to Mama. In fact, she is her ex-daughter-in-
law
.

“Sort of like you dashing off to Japan,” Mama said. “Right, dear?”

Wynnell, who is guilty of having done just that, had the decency to blush. “Touché, Mozella. Have you tried calling Toy?”

“You bet I did,” Mama said, as she snapped a breadstick in two. “Some little tart named Tiffany had the temerity to answer his cell phone.”

“Alliteration is frowned on these days, Mama,” I said.

Mama frowned. “Echo schmeko,” she said, in response to a raised red pen somewhere, for she was practically on the verge of swearing. “I’m not done talking. The ink is barely dry on Toy’s divorce papers, and he’s already shacking up with a bimbette who had the nerve to then ask me who I was. Can y’all believe that?”

“We can’t,” we chorused.

Before anyone could gain the floor again, Wynnell snapped her breadstick, then
another
, and then waved a third one pointedly at each of us. “So, as I was about to say,” she said, enunciating each word as if she was teaching a class of immigrants (perhaps from countries where non-Indo-European languages were spoken), “being in Waxhaw yesterday has reminded me where my priorities lie.”

“They lie with your husband, Ed,” Mama said. I’d never heard her speak that sharply—at least not in a public place.

“And that’s where you should lie too,” Bob said.

It was clear just by the various contortions of her forehead muscles that Wynnell sorely regretted giving up her unibrow. “What are you two driving at?”

“The same thing that you are, dear,” I said. “You’re homesick for the Charlotte region. And when you were wandering around all those lovely antiques shops in Waxhaw, you began to envision a life there for yourself.”

“So what if I have?”

“But everyone knows that your husband Ed loves fishing and that he’s becoming a little—uh—set in his ways. To leave him now would be cruel.”

Wynnell aggressively poked the air in front of Mama with the last remaining whole stick. “It’s not definitive that he has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “All his doctor will commit to is that he is slowing down some. But I ask you, aren’t we all getting slower?”

“Still, you would divorce him
this
late in the game? Honestly, Wynnell, I thought you were better than this.”

“Why look who’s talking, Mozella! First of all, I’m not divorcing him; he’s free to come along if he wishes. And secondly, I wouldn’t be throwing stones if I were you, given that you live in a palace of the finest, most fragile crystal ever created.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Mama squawked, and actually threw both halves of her breadstick in my friend’s triumphant, and until recently hirsute, face.

Of course, as far as I was concerned it was all over now except for plucking the chicken. “By the way,” I said to Wynnell, “first you might try Sun City just over the border in Lancaster County, South Carolina. I’ve been told that they have every kind of activity imaginable, so I bet that they have fishing—or at least fishing trips. With all that stimulation, you might find that Ed won’t decline that fast.

“Now on to you, Mama.”

“What?”

“If you added the word
ever
you’d have the most annoying word in the English language. I heard it on NPR—but I forget
their
source. Anyway, Mama, what’s your glass castle yet again this time?”

She took a deep breath. “Well, I might as well get this out now. And just so you know, even Toy isn’t privy to this information.”

Chapter 29

S
pit it out, Mama. The longer you try to drag it out, the harder it will get.”

“I’m not a widder woman,” she said, cringing.

“Please, Mama,” I begged, “we’re being serious here.”

“She is serious,” Wynnell said. “Go on, Mozella, tell her the rest.”

“When your father died—well, he didn’t die as quickly as you thought he did. After that gull hit him and he crashed the speedboat, how long do you reckon it was until I buried your daddy?”

“A couple of days, Mama. I was eleven years old. I remember; you can’t tell me different.”

“You remember a private prayer service that we had at the church—just family—but that’s all, because by then your daddy had been airlifted up to Duke. They were working on a new procedure—something that might reverse brain damage in people thought to be brain dead, who were being kept alive only by machines. You see, I was desperate, and I couldn’t pull the plug.”

I began to cry. Silently. All these years later I didn’t even want to know how long Daddy may have lived after the accident. Because that wasn’t really
my
daddy hooked up to the machine, even if it wasn’t my right, or Mama’s right, to pull the plug.

“What is your point, Mama?”

“My point is that I couldn’t afford any of this. I was going to lose the house, and then most probably you kids, so when a lawyer suggested that maybe I divorce your daddy and let the state take over payments, I—Abby, I want you to know that I really struggled with that decision. So anyway, I guess then that my point really is that by the time your daddy passed on his own, I was a divorced woman. Technically, I guess, I have no right to call myself a widow woman.”

I jumped out of my chair and hugged Mama so tight that she started to choke. Then I patted her back and made her take a couple of sips of her sweet tea.

“Wynnell Crawford,” I said, measuring each word as carefully as I would the ingredients of a sponge cake, “that was so unfair. I didn’t need to hear that, and Mama certainly didn’t need to tell me that.”

My intent was to stare across the table at Wynnell and make her feel so guilty that she would cry as well. But Wynnell is essentially a good woman, with a heart as big as the Piedmont, and she was already crying. The problem with my oldest friend is that both her conscience and her common sense buttons are located slightly to the right, and behind, her impulse button. If she were a car she would be recalled.

“Mo-z-ella, Ab-b-by,” she blubbered, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I am so sorry. So, so sorry! Can you ever forgive me?”

“We’ll try,” I said. “Won’t we, Mama?” I answered first, partly because I didn’t want Mama to jump in with an immediate pardon. Wynnell might be feeling the deepest remorse possible, but she still needed to swing in the breeze for a few minutes.
Needed
, not deserved.

“Sun City does sound like a good fit for Ed,” Bob said.

I smiled at him gratefully. “Yes, I think we should all take a look at it on our way home.”

There still remained the not-so-small problem of Calamity Jane. As a means of penance I took Wynnell with me on my after-dinner hunch. Unlike on the coast, there are evenings in the Piedmont, even in August, where the temperatures become almost bearable after dark. This was one of those occasions.

So as not to be too obtrusive, we parked in the public spaces adjacent to Amherst Green’s mail kiosk and around the block from the late Aunt Jerry’s townhouse. The shrill sound of cicadas screaming in the woods behind the development seemed to add a layer of protection to our adventure. If we could barely hear each other talk, then surely nobody else could.

“How are we going to get in?” Wynnell all but shouted. “Don’t tell me you have a key.”

“No, no key. We’re going around to the back. The garden gate is unlocked. And so is the bedroom window. I made sure of that.”

She grinned. “You deserve your gumshoes. Abby, you’ve gotten to be as good as your husband at this.”

“What?”

“Never mind, I’ll tell you later.”

“Okay.” The truth is I’d heard just fine. It was also true that I was developing quite a reputation for solving mysteries, which was a good thing, given that an uncanny amount had come my way over the past few years. At any rate, everyone likes a compliment, right?

Wynnell was likewise impressed to see the beautiful palm garden, but she wasn’t surprised. She had a cousin over in Five Knolls who was also into palms, and had spotted several on her trip to Waxhaw.

“Abby,” she said, after we’d let ourselves through the window, “I’m surprised that this is as tasteful as it is. I thought that maybe she slept in a giant pink clamshell supported by a quartet of blackamoors.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you had to have met her. Jerry Ovumkoph was—uh—”

“Tasteful?”

“Yes. I’m telling you, Wynnell, I only knew her for five minutes, but it’s like she’s been burned in my brain.”

“Abby, you’re sort of like that—to me, at least. When I walk into a crowded room and you’re there, somehow I immediately seem to find you.”

“Aw shucks, Wynnell. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Does the same thing happen to you?”

“Absolutely,” I said. It was the truth too, albeit for different reasons.

“Abby, what is that sound?” Wynnell said.

“I hope and pray it’s my hunch,” I said.

“Abby, you know I have a hard time with Apparition Americans. I’m not like you or C.J. in that regard.”

“They won’t hurt you,” I said. “Not usually. Besides, if we find my hunch in time she’ll remain a very large, pleasantly annoying American—the apparition part will just have to wait.”

“You think that C.J.’s in here someplace?”

“That’s what I’m betting on: that she never left the house. Now all we need to do is be quiet and listen.”

“There!” Wynnell whispered loudly. “I hear it again. Do you think that’s Morse code?”

“Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s coming from upstairs. Let’s go!”

“Shouldn’t we call 911 first?” Wynnell said.

“No. If it’s squirrels—”

“Yeah,” she said, agreeing from experience. “Then they’ll think that we’re squirrelly.”

We weren’t totally stupid, however. Wynnell carried a small fire extinguisher that she found sitting on the counter next to the oven in the kitchen, and I carried a croquette mallet from the hall closet. If need be, together we would club and smother whatever type of American awaited us upstairs, and if on the odd chance it turned out to be of the apparition variety, then we were psyched to run out the front door screaming.

Trust me; screaming really is just about all that one can do with a ghost. The carrying on, by the way, is merely for his or her ego. Apparition Americans can be quite flattered by excessive attention, and thereby rendered malleable. It is the ignored spirits that tend to be destructive and end up throwing things. But no ghost,
ever
, is capable of doing physical harm to a human being.

At the top of stairs was a loft area that had been outfitted with a pair of antique couches. Both were upholstered in orange cut velvet with about a million puffs and buttons—really rather splendid if you got over the gauche factor. On the largest wall hung a large framed copy of the oil painting by Lord Frederic Leighton titled
Flaming Jane
, which depicts a reclining woman dressed in a flowing orange gown. The only other piece of furniture in the loft was a child’s rocking chair which appeared to date from Edwardian times.

From the loft one needed to cross a bridge to reach the bedrooms, all of which were on the left front side of the house. But on the right, just past the bridge, was a door that presumably led to storage—perhaps even an attic. It was from there that the strange noises seemed to be coming.

“Wynnell,” I whispered, “you’re older than me, right?”

“What does that have to do with anything,” she snapped.

“Just that you’ve lived a longer, fuller life. Therefore, you wouldn’t mind opening that door, would you?”

“In your dreams,” she said, and gave me a push.

One can either spend a night quivering under the covers, or waste no time in leaning over the bed to face the monster beneath. Sometimes it’s not a matter of choice. When Wynnell pushed me, I landed against the door with a thud. A second later whatever lay beyond responded with a multitude of thumps and groans. To be honest, I was a mite miffed that Wynnell had actually laid hands on me, and since I would never touch her in return, I decided to channel that anger to help me slay the dragon.

“Come on out!” I roared, as I flung open what was indeed an attic door. (And yes, this mouse
can
roar—well, sort of.)

“It’s C.J.!” Wynnell actually did roar. “Look at her. She’s all bound up!”

I looked. If it wasn’t for the top of the big galoot’s shaggy head of dishwater blond hair, and her enormous hands and feet, I wouldn’t have recognized her, so thoroughly was she wrapped in duct tape.

“Call 911,” I said, and leaped forward to begin the rescue process. I may not be a Boy Scout or a Saint Bernard, but I am a well-prepared antiques dealer, which means that I carry a Leatherman around in my purse wherever I go. This handy-dandy tool can do just about anything, except write good reviews in
Kirkus
.

“Hold it right there!” a deep voice said.

I didn’t have to turn my head as much as a millimeter to identify the speaker. “Go ahead and do your worst, Bob.”