by Lesley Kagen
So for now, all I can do is grin and bear his silent treatment, which seems to be par for the course of love. According to the same Good Housekeeping magazine article, there are no matchups, not even the ones made in Heaven, that are not without “a few wrinkles that a wife will need to iron out after the honeymoon.”
FACT: One of the other bones I got to pick with Charlie is that I’m not sure how good a breadwinner he will be.
PROOF: If he wants to be a first-rate private detective who holds up his end of our family business, he needs to keep his eyes peeled and BE PREPARED at all times, which he isn’t.
Through the branches of his backyard bushes, I can see him studying the wild blue yonder along with Pyewacket, when what my fiancé should be doing is noticing me wrestling my sister around in the bushes. Of course, I could be mad, but as half owner of the Siamese and Charlie, I can’t help it. It does my heart good to see them spending time together doing their shared bird-watching hobby. Pye is snugged-up in his lap, pretending to lick away at a huge, horrible burr in her fur, but I know that’s a ruse. Because Daddy always said, “You can’t kid a kidder,” I know that she’s really on the hunt. I haven’t made up my mind yet to love her, but I do greatly admire this cat from the Orient for the way she moves so stealthily and her picky taste in people, but I am most impressed by her power to force me to give her windmill cookie crumbs with those spooky blue eyes of hers. (Knowing how to hypnotize people like that doctor in the I Was a Teenage Werewolf movie? That’d be so cool, daddy-o, cool. I’d make my sister listen to me at all times and I’d force Charlie to bare his soul to me, and if I could stand looking into Gert’s face for a few minutes I’d make her hand over her hearing aids, and one morning at the breakfast table, I’d say, Look into my eyes . . . look into my eyes, Louise Mary Fitzgerald Finley. When I snap my fingers, you will wake up and love Birdie and me as much as you did before Daddy died.)
“Let go of me, Tessie!” Birdie says, strangled-sounding, when she’s trying to worm out of the half nelson I got her in that has now become a quarter nelson. Because she’s so damn strong and slick from the heat, and when she wants to see my fiancé, she really does, with one more wiggle and a twist, she slips out of my arms.
12:41 p.m. Watchful Pyewacket—she has staying on guard at all times in common with her other half owner, Mr. McGinty—immediately spots Birdie barreling toward the Garfields’ back porch, so she hops off Charlie’s lap and streaks past me on the way back to the caretaker’s shack, but my future better half isn’t so lucky.
“Knock it off, Bird,” I say when I reach the two of them just in time to slap my hand over her mouth so she doesn’t juicy smooch Charlie’s cheek again, which he doesn’t seem to mind sometimes, but this is not one of those times. His peepers are close in color to Birdie’s and my birthstone, a light green, and the left one twitches like crazy when he’s worked up about something, which makes it look like he’s winking at me over and over and that’s so adorable, I can’t barely take it. I want to shout from the roof of his house, I love you to death, Charlie “Cue Ball” Garfield and I can’t hardly wait until the day we’re standing at the altar together, even if you are the most wrinkly kid I know next to Birdie! But I’m not sure how he’d take that, so I just peel my sister offa him, flip her into the deep leaf pile next to the porch, and tug my ninety-eight-pound weakling back up again.
“You okay?” I ask him.
He shakes his head, wipes off his slobbered cheek with the back of his hand, and tells me “M . . . M . . . Missus Klement told m . . . m . . . my dad this m . . . m . . . morning that Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary went m . . . m . . . missing last night,” Charlie struggles to say. Most of the time he talks like everybody else, but when he gets really upset, he starts talking with this cute little m stutter. (This is just a theory of mine that has not been proven, but I think the reason Charlie’s tongue gets so twisted up on m words when he gets worked up is because that’s the letter mom starts with.) “Ya know anything about that, Tessie?”
FACT: The famous saying “The course of true love is full of potholes,” is so true.
PROOF: I’m having now what is known as mixed feelings. Because we both love Birdie, I thought Charlie and me had hating our principal in common, so I’m disappointed that he’s got himself riled up about her disappearance. But at the same time, I’m feeling this rush of gushy love for him warming up my whole body and dang, I’m desiring very much to stick my finger in that dent in his chin and wiggle it around a little.
“Yeah, I know that Sister went missing and . . . and a whole lot more,” I tell him, “but . . .” I’m saved from veering into a love spat by the clang . . . clang . . . clanging of St. Kate’s church bells informing the neighborhood that it’s 12:45 p.m. “I don’t have time now to explain it all. I’ll fill you in on our way to—”
“The train station,” he says.
“The . . . the . . . WHAT?”
“Tell me the truth, Tessie.” My fiancé looks over at Birdie like he doesn’t want her to hear what he has to say, which he doesn’t have to worry about. She’s sitting in the middle of the red and gold leaves next to the porch that Charlie must’ve been raking before he started staring up at the sky, happily goofing around with her cat’s cradle string and coming up with some newfangled pattern I’ve never seen before. “Did your not showing up for the m . . . m . . . meetin’ under the weeping willow have something to do with Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary disappearing?” Charlie says softly, because he hardly ever uses a loud, angry voice. His father does enough of that for the whole family. Birdie and me can hear Mr. Garfield going at his boys late at night, and it takes all I got not to jump out of bed, run over there, and give him a piece of my mind. “Ya didn’t do something ya weren’t supposed to, did ya?” Charlie’s left eye is doing an impression of a Mexican jumping bean, and if he had hair, he would be raking his beautiful fingers through it. “If ya finally did do one of the terrible things to Sister M and M that you been promisin’ to do . . .” He squats down, slides a wad of damp-looking dollar bills out of the side of his hightop black sneakers and presses it into my hand. “I grabbed our treasury m . . . m . . . money outta the tree hole just in case the Finley sisters had to m . . . m . . . make a break for it.”
Oh, Charlie, my Charlie.
See why I can’t help but adore him, wrinkles and all?
This boy . . . he always thinks the best of m . . . m . . . me.
17
STATISTICALLY SPEAKING
’Cause the three of us have lived in this neighborhood our whole lives, The Mutual Admiration Society knows all the best shortcuts.
We didn’t have time for even a short meeting of the minds on Charlie’s back porch, so when we’re racing down the alley that’ll take us the fastest way to church—Charlie is holding one of Birdie’s hands and I got hold of the other to keep her from gallivanting into Mr. Holland’s yard to grab ripe apples off his tree—I announce, “I hereby call The Mutual Admiration Society to order,” and give Charlie the Reader’s Digest version of THE CASE OF THE MISSING NUN WHO MIGHT BE KIDNAPPED AND MURDERED BUT NOT BY MR. MCGINTY as we bust through the crooked white gate in the Baxters’ backyard, duck under the wash that’s hanging on the Muldoons’ clothesline, hop the rickety fence in the Winners’ side yard, and run across 68th St. to our final destination—St. Kate’s.
When we come to a stop at the bottom of the steps, Charlie grabs a hold of the metal railing and pants out, “I’m really glad that Birdie saw Sister Margaret Mary near the weeping willow, because that means Mister McGinty didn’t murder her and neither did you, Tessie.”
“Yeah, but just ’cause we know now that Sister Margaret Mary isn’t dead, that doesn’t mean—”
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
What in the hell kind of cruddy president am I?
This is a huge something to miss that could really affect our bottom line!
“Maybe I saw som
e other person getting murdered in Holy Cross last night!” I shout as we climb the steps toward the big church doors.
“Ummm . . .” Charlie says, “please don’t take this the wrong way, Tessie, but you do have a tendency to . . . ahhh . . .”
“Lie?”
“That’s true, but what I was gonna say is that maybe your facts are right about what you heard and saw out your window last night, but you mighta just added them up wrong. Like that time you saw your mother drop something into your applesauce at the fish fry and you were so sure that it was curare or . . . or how about the night we were spyin’ on Mister Johnson doing some stuffing in his basement and you immediately went positive that he was working on the head of a man with a thick tan beard.”
“But . . .”
Okay, fine. It might’ve been a little too far-fetched to think that Louise dropped curare into my applesauce instead of mixing in that disgusting crushed-up iron pill that she’s always trying to force down my throat, but I’d just seen a Sherlock Holmes movie at the Tosa Theatre where that deadly poison was a real problem for him and Watson. And I really resent Charlie bringing up that spying night over at Mr. Johnson’s house. Didn’t I right away admit that I might’ve jumped the gun when the Lutheran taxidermist reached for his beer and I could see by the light on his work table that the head he was working on really belonged to a deer and not a man with a thick tan beard? (We might not have caught him doing something bad that night, but I still think he’s stuffing things he isn’t supposed to in his basement.)
“But if I didn’t see or hear somebody getting murdered,” I say to Charlie in more of a henpecked way than a future wife maybe should, because if he thinks I am going to marry him if he keeps pulling the rug out from under me like this, he’s got another think coming, “then what do you think I saw and heard last night?”
“The Gilgood mausoleum is near the necking tree,” he says, like he has given this a lot of thought.
“Roger that, Charlie,” Birdie nods and tells him with one of her irresistible smiles.
“So what you might’ve witnessed, Tessie, was two greasers having a screaming m . . . m . . . match about how many bases they should run and when the girl wouldn’t do what the boy wanted her to do he punched her in the face and . . . and that’s why she screamed and her body went limp, and then he took her back behind the m . . . m . . . mausoleum to kick her when she was down.”
He knows a lot about what goes on under the necking tree because his four older brothers, when they aren’t wrestling boys, wrestle with girls beneath its branches and they have no problem bragging about who they pinned. And even though his father is not a Golden Gloves champ, the reason Charlie started nervous stuttering is because he knows almost as much as I do about punching and knocking people out. His father used to do that to his mother. Mrs. Garfield couldn’t hide those purple bruises under her eyes at Mass on Sunday no matter how much Pan-Cake makeup she piled on.
But even though what Charlie said could’ve happened last night, because those greasers do have hot-to-trotting and fighting as their two main hobbies, I’m not even close to being sold on that idea. So when my sister bats her slightly bulging eyes at him and says, like she thinks his idea is the best idea she’s heard of since the invention of peanut butter and marshmallow on Wonder bread, “Charlie, that’s such smart thinking!” I’m starting to feel like the odd man out around here, and like maybe I need to spend some time refreshing my sister’s memory about which of us Charlie is engaged to.
My fiancé stops climbing and says to Birdie, “Thank you for the vote of confidence,” but then he turns and says to me, “I really hate to break it to ya, ’cause I know how m . . . m . . . much you’re counting on this now since she wasn’t m . . . m . . . murdered, but . . .” Whatever he’s about to tell me, isn’t going to be good. “Sister M . . . M . . . Margaret M . . . M . . . Mary getting kidnapped by M . . . M . . . Mister Mc . . . Mc . . . McGinty or anybody else is very far-fetched.”
That’s such an awful thing for him to say that I’m too shocked at first to form words to argue with him, and if Birdie opens her mouth to agree with him one more time, I don’t care if she is a featherweight, I’m going to smack her clean off this step!
FACT: The Finley sisters were in the cemetery all morning, so we’ve been out of touch, or what Modern Detection calls “incommunicado.” You wouldn’t believe what can go on in this neighborhood in a couple of hours. Babies get born every five seconds, Mr. Skank gets a new customer on his table, some kid breaks another kid’s nose and sends him to the hospital, fires get set, windows broken, the gals have gab sessions over their backyard fences and hang out some other poor gal to dry.
PROOF: I’m getting a very bad feeling in my guts that Charlie is getting ready to tell me something he heard about our principal’s disappearance that I don’t want to hear.
Reaching into my pocket, I make a wish on Daddy’s holy lucky Swiss Army Knife before I choke out the question Charlie better say no to, if he knows what’s good for him, “Sister hasn’t turned up, has she?”
“Not that I heard, but . . .”
O, thank you, St. Jude, patron saint of lost objects and persons, for sleeping on the job!
“What I mean is that when I heard Missus Klement tell my dad that Sister M and M had disappeared,” Charlie explains as the three of us go back to hiking up the rest of the church steps, “I got some ideas about what mighta happened to her and kidnapping wasn’t one of them. Statistically speaking, somebody getting snatched for ransom happens about as often as a triple play.”
Charlie is on rock-solid ground now. Just like undertaking Mr. Art Skank, he knows a lot about Braves baseball and who swings and misses and how many bases get stolen and how often the Green Bay Packers win or lose, and it’s not only sports he keeps track of. My fiancé marks down what flowers are the most popular at the cemetery, what people’s favorite colors are, who dies from what disease or accident, which Masses get the biggest crowds, how many and what kinds of birds he sees, and I guess how often nuns get kidnapped. (He’s never said, but I bet he even keeps track of how many mothers do away with themselves and how many times their sweet boys are the ones who find them in their garages.)
This constant recording of things is not one of Charlie’s better qualities. This is one of his wrinkles I will have to iron out after our honeymoon in Wisconsin Dells. He’s too black-and-white, too much like Joe “Just the facts, ma’am” Friday. I’d like him to spend less time noticing how often things do happen and more time thinking about what could’ve happened, because being able to picture a crime in your mind is a very important part of being a gumshoe, according to Modern Detection. “The ability to envision possible scenarios that may have unfolded during the commission of a crime is an essential skill an investigator must endeavor to achieve.”
So with the words of famous Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower still ringing in my ears, and because the “Secrets of a Happy Marriage” article said that even if a wife completely disagrees with their husband, sometimes it’s better to pretend that you don’t because that can cause fur to fly, I say to Charlie, “If you’re so sure Sister Margaret Mary wasn’t kidnapped, what other possible scenarios do you think unfolded to make her disappear?”
“You coulda unfolded on her, for one thing,” he says adorably. “And accidents are always a major cause of missing persons. Maybe Sister went down to check the hole that Two-Ton Thomkins made in the basement steps and she fell in and nobody found her yet, the same way Timmy Martin is always falling into abandoned wells and doesn’t get rescued until Lassie shows up. Or maybe Sister’s disappearing wasn’t an accident at all. She coulda done something on purpose.”
“Like what, Charlie?” a practically drooling-all-over him Birdie asks.
“Well, she coulda run off to get married like that priest at Mother of Good Hope did, or maybe she quit her job like that gal in The Nun’s Story did.
”
Well, isn’t he just a little statistically speaking black cloud raining all over my private-dick parade.
But facts are facts, no matter how much I don’t want to face them and my down-to-earth future husband might be on to something here. I was so sure that our principal had been murdered last night in the cemetery and according to my sister, I was wrong about that, so I guess Sister M & M might not have been kidnapped, either, and admitting that to myself has got my tummy more knotted up than the Boy Scout handbook. (No joke.)
What about my shopping spree?
All my BE PREPARED plans?
How about my idea to stuff our running-away jar so full of blackmail or reward greenbacks that if Gert Klement convinces Louise to send Birdie and me to our “homes” that we’ll be able to run away in style to live in California and . . .
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
Who’s in charge around here?!
I put my foot down and tell Charlie, “You could be right that something else happened to Sister Margaret Mary besides Mister McGinty or anybody else kidnapping her, but then what about the Saint Christopher medal Birdie found in the leaf pile with their initials on it? How does that figure into all this?”
Charlie shrugs—he really loves to shrug—and says, “Ya got me.”
You better believe I do, my match made in Heaven. Until death do us part, I want to say, but I’m not sure how he’d take that, so instead I clear my throat and tell him more businesslike, “As president of The Mutual Admiration Society, I hereby declare that we’ll keep investigating Sister’s disappearance like she has been kidnapped until we find evidence that proves she wasn’t.”
“Roger that, Tessie,” Birdie says, and when Charlie pulls open one of the church’s doors, he must be on board, too, because when he ushers the Finley sisters into St. Kate’s, he bows his head and tells me, “Your wish is my command,” and ya know what? If I didn’t have serious detecting and confessing to do, I would very much like to pucker up and take him up on that offer.
