Wedding Bell Blues (15 page)

Mr. Gaddy pushed his glasses tighter on his nose, came from behind the pharmacy window. “I'll give a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate.”

“Thank you,” I said. I'd always liked Mr. Gaddy. He'd flavored all my cough syrups and yucky medicines with coconut because he knew that was one of my favorite tastes, right up there with lemon.

In the bright light of day and a ceiling full of fluorescents, as opposed to the spooky night when Malinda and I had come for more prescription bottle tops, the drugstore looked like any small-town drugstore was supposed to: rows of over-the-counter health remedies, a magazine rack, the cosmetics aisle and of course the soda fountain/lunch counter. But I felt as if Ossie DelGardo's shadow, or the memory of him, lurked just outside the door, around the corner and into the alley.

When Mr. Gaddy was out of earshot I told Malinda, “I found the wallet. I showed Ossie the photos and told him how this woman was threatening me.”

“And?” Malinda said as she straightened and stacked the posters. “What?”

“He didn't laugh. At least he didn't do that, but I could swear he must have been thinking what fun he was going to have telling Juanita what a little scaredy-cat I am.”

“What did you want him to do?”

“Take me seriously,” I said. “Believe me. Treat me like I have some sense.”

“I think you have to earn all that.” Malinda put the cover back over the copier.

Since when had she gotten so philosophical? And just when I needed her to be on my side. I wanted total sympathy. But she did have a point. I hugged her, thanked her for all her work on my behalf and Robert Redford's.

I took a handful of posters and headed home.

 

Chapter Twenty-three

When I got there Scott was at the kitchen table eating a bacon, fig and Brie sandwich Ida Plum had made him. Pig and Fig. One of my favorites. “His mother doesn't cook,” she said, and poured him a glass of tea. “I don't know how she raised him.”

I thought how humiliating it must be to be an adult and move back in with your parents. I guess that's what Scott did when he came back. After Cedora, after another life. What had he done in California to occupy himself between music gigs and practicing, while his wife (?) Cedora was making herself famous? Build sets for some movie studio? Construction work? Is that how he learned to do all the carpentry and other stuff?

I wondered if Scott still slept in his childhood bedroom at his mother's house, if it had bunk beds and wallpaper patterned with spaceships or boats or some cartoon character. Snoopy sheets and towels? I had lost a lot of years with Scott, as he had with me, and so far the only filling in the blanks we'd done had been in bed, not catching up on where we'd been and who we'd been with. He had been ahead of me in high school. I hadn't known him as much as I had heard about him. Then when I came back to Littleboro, he was the one to pitch in and help me patch up my house and try to turn it into a business. And occasionally try out one of my beds, with me in it. Just not often enough, and not enough to let me know where I stood. I didn't know where I fitted in his life, if at all. We were both trying to patch together our lives these days and we managed to get a little busy between the sheets on a few occasions, too few and too far between lately. Mostly, as most people did in Littleboro, I let things ride.

Ida Plum had told me she had
heard
that Scott married Cedora Harris, his high school sweetheart, the one the whole town said had “Talent with a capital T.” But I didn't know if Ida Plum knew that for sure or it was just one of those things you hear but don't have confirmed. If it hadn't been reported in
The Mess,
then it didn't happen. I needed to check files at
The Mess
office. Maybe later when I wasn't chasing down a runaway rabbit. Or was the only one who seemed concerned about a missing, maybe murdered man Reba had called God.

I knew those files were not online, probably never would be, and to check would mean a whole day, or days, of my life looking through microfilm. There would be a lot of press on Cedora I was sure. I'd heard about her most of my life. Her voice. She sang like a red-haired angel and stood out in the church choir any Sunday she decided to put in an appearance. She won some sort of state talent contest, then was a finalist in the Miss America competition, but not the winner. I remembered watching it with Mama Alice. The whole town couldn't understand why
our
Cedora only came in as a finalist. It was probably the last Miss America pageant I ever watched. Art school, then the Maine years with Ben Johnson occupied my time. He didn't even own a TV. He really believed electronics were polluting the airwaves.

“Do you have a hammer?” I asked Scott. “I need a hammer and some tacks.”

“Can't use one of mine,” he said between bites of his sandwich. “My hammers are personally weighted to my hands and body rhythms. These are healing, knowing hands.” He wiggled ten fingers, reached across and patted my hip.

I plundered in Mama Alice's junk drawer until at the back I found a small hammer, then got some pushpins from my check-in desk in the hall. I waved the hammer at Scott as I walked past.

“Not so fast.” He grabbed one of my belt loops. “We need to catch up. Ossie knows Reba's out and he's okay with it. He wanted to let her stay in the jail cell until he could get more information on her situation. At the moment, the fellow Reba thought she killed is in Moore County Medical, critical condition.”

I knew that already. Front page of
The Pilot,
but I didn't say that I knew.

“That's the latest,” Scott said. “Word is the fellow could go either way. Whatever Reba thought she did, Ossie said there was not a mark on him. Could be pills or some combination of stuff he swallowed, or smoked. If he doesn't make it, his body will go to Chapel Hill for an autopsy.”

“And Reba? What will happen to her then?”

“That's Ossie's call. Police business.”

“And that's the way Mr. Ossie wants to have it,” Ida Plum said, “with your nose out of it, Beth McKenzie.”

“I have to find Verna's rabbit before it's too late.” I pulled loose from Scott's hold on my belt loops. Since when and where had Scott gotten buddy-buddy with Ossie DelGardo? At the Breakfast Nook? Blue's Dinette? Service station? Probably at one of the guy hangouts in this town.

“Any chance Robert Redford is with Reba, wherever she is? Her tree?” Scott used his napkin, left it beside his plate. I saw Ida Plum had given him some of Mama Alice's secret-recipe sweet-and-sour pickles. The open jar was too near his plate so I removed temptation. I picked up that jar and screwed on the lid. People loved those pickles so much they couldn't stop with just one. The jar was half-full and I didn't know how many Scott had eaten or how many jars we had left. These were reserved for special occasions and special people. Ida Plum must have felt Scott Smith was one of those. I was still thinking on that one. Our relationship at the moment was just that, a relationship. More than friends, but not really committed to anything heading toward permanent. I didn't know whether either of us wanted that. We were in the middle.

“You don't worry about Miss Reba,” Ida Plum told Scott, then she looked at me and winked. “We got her covered.”

Scott reached over and did a tap dance with his fingers on my arm, lifted his face for a kiss.

“No hammer,” I said and whirled around, “no kiss.”

“Stingy with your affection, aren't you?” Scott grinned. “Why do I always have to earn your love?”

“Not earn,” I said. “I've got scars and scabs you haven't seen from this battle of just taking things one day at a time.”

“And I've got to build one more booth, reinforce the bandstand, then hang some banners and sheeting,” Scott said. “If this festival thing happened more than once a year, it would kill us all. Work us to death.”

“Worry us to death,” Ida Plum said. She picked up his plate. “Even if some of us have to keep the everyday wheels turning.” She looked at me, pointed to a bill on the counter: $240. The real plumber had come and gone. “He said these old houses are only patch-up jobs until the next fitting decides to spring a leak. I think he looked around and saw graduate school for his kids.”

“Thank you,” I said. And meant it. She was my rock, my steady ground to stand on when the world around me was crashing like ocean waves. “Mr. Fortune get back?” I asked, as I ran my hand over the hammer handle. I bet my grandmother's hands were the last ones to touch this hammer. Or had this hammer belonged to my grandfather, the furniture maker, the woodworker? I could almost feel a warmth in the worn smoothness.

“Who's Mr. Fortune?” Scott stood and pushed his chair in.

“The person who found Verna after she fell,” I said. “And my latest Dixie Dew guest.” I pointed upstairs.

“What does he look like?” Scott asked.

I wondered why he'd want to know and felt like saying none of your beeswax, that old sassy grade school answer. Instead I said, “Oh, you'll know him when you see him.”

Ida Plum laughed. “He's not only a mystery, he's picking up our mystery guest. Someone to do something with the festival.”

Scott rolled his eyes. He knew something he wasn't telling.

I left Scott with his hand in the cookie jar and Ida Plum pretending to slap it. The cookie jar was in the shape of a giant green apple. It had been on my grandmother's kitchen counter as long as I could remember. And as long as I could remember it was never empty, most often filled with oatmeal raisin cookies baked from scratch, except when I came home last fall. There hadn't been a crumb in that cookie jar. My grandmother had been in the nursing home where she died after her fall. Sometimes I stocked the jar with packaged stuff, but not often, and sometimes I cheated and popped in some “almost homemade” oatmeal cookies with coconut and chocolate chips from the new Phoenix Bakery that had opened next to Gaddy's Drug Store.

I grabbed a box of tacks and headed out the front door.

 

Chapter Twenty-four

Reba was the first person I met outside the white picket gate of the Dixie Dew. She was humming some tune I couldn't quite name and carrying one of Verna's umbrellas that had a bent spoke. The sky was a perfect blue. Not one cloud sailed across it. Verna's umbrella had one side flopped down like a huge red bird with a broken wing.

Reba wore an orange chenille housecoat I'd seen on Verna's clothesline in the past. The tufts were gone in a lot of places and it was too short for her. She'd tied the belt in front so the back hiked up, where I saw some of the long-legged panties Verna favored. They had torn and ragged lace on the legs that came to Reba's knees.

If Verna was able to come home after some rehab, she wouldn't miss that robe or the panties. I bet in that house she had a dozen packs of new panties ordered from some old-fashioned mail-order place in New England. I'd seen stacks of their brown catalogs on one of her tables downstairs.

“Think it's going to rain, Reba?” I asked, as I tacked a poster to the utility pole.

“Sometime,” she said, and looked at a sky so clear and bright it blazed blue.

She was right. It was going to rain. Sometime. Just please not on our Green Bean Festival.

“Where you headed?” I asked as I walked and she walked beside me, holding the poor umbrella over my head.

“Not to jail.” She punched the air with her fist. “Not to Mr. Ossie's jailhouse room. No sirree. Broke the door down.” She laughed, jumped up and down and jiggled the umbrella with both hands.

I tacked up more posters. Reba held the posters to the poles with the tip of her umbrella while I tacked.

“You haven't seen Robert Redford anywhere, have you?” I tapped the poster.

“TV,” she said. “On a horse, horsey, horse.”

“I mean the rabbit named Robert Redford. The white rabbit.”

She shook her head no. “No rabbit nowhere no time. Anytime.” She walked on. Barefoot. Which made me remember her flip-flops. In my car parked in my driveway. With her wedding dress. The wedding, which started this whole business of God and him being dead and Reba killing him. She seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. Jail had been the most recent thing on her mind. I wondered how much wedding cake she'd eaten and if the rest of it was left in Verna's bed for rats and mice and who knows what else to find.

Reba skipped down the street like a child, the umbrella bouncing up and down. Oh, to be so innocent, so absolutely carefree, trusting in everything and everybody.

For a long moment I just stood and watched Reba skipping down that sidewalk, stopping to hop over a raised place or crack, and I wondered if maybe all of us who had been involved in the so-called wedding joke had learned a lesson. In our boredom and need for something to talk about, a shared experience, we had used her. Not something to be proud of. Now one man was missing and maybe dead, another one nearly dead, plus a wild and strange woman was after me breathing fire. Verna could have a broken ankle and Robert Redford was missing. Or dead? And people thought this was a quiet little town where nothing ever happened. Little did they know that underneath the appearance of peace and tranquility in Littleboro things went on. And on and on. The ordinary and sometimes, since I had moved back, the not so ordinary. Dead or nearly dead bodies kept blocking my way toward normal. Quiet small-town days and months and years. The kind I'd grown up with and wanted back. Peace and harmony. No crime. No Ossie DelGardo anywhere in sight.

We had births and deaths, but these days in Littleboro, we had more deaths than births.
The Mess
always had at least a half page of long obituaries and during the winter months, more. The obits said things like “Zelina Hatley passed at age 101 after having lived a good life in the community where she was born.” Other deaths were ages ninety-six or eighty-eight, teachers, a barber beloved by the whole town, pillars of Littleboro. Gone. Buried on the hill. Not many moved in. People kept “dying off” as the saying went. The population was dwindling.