by Tamar Myers
“Oh yes,” she said, and reached around me for another cookie. “My great-great-great-granddaddy, Silas MacGregor, built the house, and passed it on to his son Bruce MacGregor.”
“MacGregor? But you’re a Maypole!”
“My grandmother, Fanny MacGregor, was an only child. She married a Maypole.”
“Your great-great-granddaddy Bruce—is he the one whose daughter, Sarah, took up with a house slave? And then when Sarah became pregnant, her daddy killed her?”
Thelma hung her head. It may have been shame, or maybe just to get a better view of the walnut-topped brownies in the glass case.
“That’s conjecture, Abby. Nobody can prove that.”
I reached out and patted her arm. It felt as cool as the brownie case.
“Thelma, dear, I found a body of a woman stuffed in the kitchen wall of your old digs.”
She pulled her arm away and turned to face me. “Is this a joke?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve asked the police to have tests run to see if she was pregnant.”
She continued to face me for what seemed like several minutes. I can only assume she was staring straight ahead in shock.
“Well,” she finally said, “one doesn’t have any control over one’s ancestors, does one?”
“Not unless the New Age take on reincarnation is right. In which case, according to some of the authors I’ve read, we pick the circumstances of our birth, in order to work through certain issues.”
“And you believe that?”
“I find it interesting to contemplate. I’ve already concluded I must have been a tall, but arrogant, blond in my last life.”
Thelma smiled weakly. “About this body—what will happen to it?”
“I don’t know. You might want to contact Sergeant Scrubb in homicide. If it turns out to be who I think it is, maybe they’ll let you bury her in a family plot.”
She nodded. “If I planned a memorial service, would you come?”
“Absolutely. I’ll even wear that dress with the hoop skirt again, if you want.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary, but thanks for offering. And thanks for telling me this in the first place. In a strange way it’s comforting.”
“Closure? That kind of thing?”
She nodded again, but she’d turned, and this time I’d bet my life on the fact she was staring at a lemon cheese cake. Either that, or the Black Forest cake next to it.
I pulled her into the produce section. I still had more business to discuss.
“Those tiles I found behind the refrigerator the night Madame Woo-Woo was murdered—were they always there?”
She was turned sideways to me, staring forlornly at the bakery department. I could see stubby lashes blinking behind the strange lenses.
“I suppose they were. Abby, I really didn’t pay much attention to that old house.”
“But Thelma, you’re a very bright woman, who seems to know something about everything. And you’ve been to Portugal!”
“Yes, that’s true,” she said without a hint of modesty. “I do know something about most things, but like I said, I always hated that house. I guess I never looked closely at those tiles.”
“Who painted them orange?”
“Mama.” She gave up on the bakery and began grazing on several varieties of seedless grapes. “Did you know that oranges have to be picked when they’re fully ripe, because unlike a lot of other fruits the process doesn’t continue once they leave the tree? That’s why orange growers get so stressed when there is an early frost.”
“Why, I didn’t know that.” The sarcasm dripping from my voice was enough to turn the sweetest, ripest orange into instant marmalade. “Did you know that the bathroom fixtures in the master suite of your old home were solid gold?”
She stared at me—well, I’m pretty sure she did. “No. But it doesn’t surprise me. Mama and Daddy both liked nice things.”
I couldn’t very well ask the woman if she’d been having second thoughts, and had been ripping off the new owner of her ancestral home. Besides, Thelma neither looked, nor acted, like a woman who needed money.
“Thelma, when y’all were remodeling the third-floor bathrooms, who changed out the fixtures?”
She picked up a gala apple, and I held my breath, hoping she’d dare to take a bite. I’ve always admired a gutsy woman.
“That’s the job I wanted, Abby, but we drew names out of a jar, and I got to refinish the dining room floor. I had to rent an electric sander—”
“Thelma, please. Just tell me who was responsible for the powder room.”
Thelma set the apple down. “Ella.”
“By herself?”
“Yes, and it took her forever—almost two weeks. We kept kidding her that she was spending her time in there writing a novel.”
“Hmm. Thelma, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a personal question about your family.”
The hexagons pointed straight down at me, and then she jerked her head. A lady in the nearby poultry corner was cooking up teriyaki chicken in an electric Dutch oven. I could sympathize with Thelma, torn as she was, between fruit and fowl.
“Let’s get a sample,” I suggested, “and then I’ll ask.”
She polished off three to my one. “Okay, Abby, what is this personal family question? It doesn’t have to do with my Uncle Varney’s time in Africa, does it?”
“No—well, maybe it does. Tell me about that.”
She sighed, even as she eyed the seafood counter. “He went to Africa as a missionary—but this was a long time ago, when I was just a baby. Uncle Varney was Mama’s youngest brother, by the way. Anyway, something went wrong out there—sunstroke, or something—and Uncle Varney took up living with a herd of baboons. When the British found him—this was Kenya—he had moved his way up through the ranks and was the alpha male. Baboons do that, you see—have alpha males and alpha females, sort of like wolves. But of course they’re not wolves, so the patterns aren’t the same. Now, where was I?”
“You were telling me about the Brits finding your uncle with the monkeys.”
“Ah yes. Well, Uncle Varney had forgotten all his English, and the Swahili he’d been forced to learn to qualify as a missionary. The only way he could communicate was to bark like a baboon. That’s what they do, you know—bark.”
“So he barked at the Brits,” I said, anxious to move the story along. “Then what?”
“Well, they tried to extricate him from the herd, but they couldn’t. So they shot him. It was for his own good, you understand. They only meant to wound him, but alas, it was fatal. They shipped Uncle Varney back to Charleston in a sealed coffin. Someone in customs insisted on opening it, and boy, were they in for a surprise.”
She paused dramatically, so I obliged. “What kind of surprise?”
“Uncle Varnie had grown a tail!”
“Thelma, dear, how well do you know Jane Cox?”
We’d reached the seafood department and she took two samples of crab spread on crackers, and handed me one. “I met her that once—the night of the séance.”
“Well, I think you two would make good friends.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, I think you have a lot in common.”
It’s always disconcerting—what’s more, it’s downright unfair—when you can’t see someone’s eyes. Still, I could tell that the prospect of making a new friend appealed to this bright and eccentric woman. Now, if only I could prove she wasn’t Madame Woo-Woo’s killer.
We entered the meat department where a perky matron was handing out pieces of Hebrew National hot dogs impaled on brightly colored toothpicks. Thelma took two, handed me one, and helped herself to another from the plate.
“Abby, I had a wonderful idea. When I’m done shopping, why don’t you follow me back to the island for lunch?”
I declined the kind offer. If I continued to follow her around the store until her shopping was done, there wouldn’t even be room in my stomach for a glass of
water. Besides, I had a new lead to follow.
22
Curiously, Ella Nolte didn’t seem surprised to see me. “It’s you,” she said, and beckoned me in.
“Miss Nolte, I wonder if I might have a few more minutes of your time.”
“I knew you’d be back. In fact, I thought you’d be back a lot sooner.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
She arranged her lips in what a charitable person might call a smile. “No doubt you’ve done a little snooping—you told me you would—and discovered that this author business is not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t play games with me, Mrs. Washburn. I’m flat broke, and you know it.”
“Actually, I didn’t—not until now.”
“But you must have had an idea. I’m sure you stopped in at Waldenbooks in Charleston Place. Or Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million up in North Charleston. I bet you couldn’t find a single copy of my books. Am I right?”
“I didn’t look for your books. But I will,” I quickly added.
“Don’t bother, because you won’t find any. My backlist has been dropped, and I haven’t had a contract in three years.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She had yet to ask me to sit, and that nose swept the length of my body like a metal detecting wand. “You’re not here to rub it in?”
“I assure you, I’m not.”
“Then have a seat.” She threw herself on a chair. “It’s a precarious business, that’s all I can say. One day you’re hot, and the next you’re not. Tastes change, and then where are you? Sometimes I wish I’d listened to my mother.”
“And what did she say?”
“Be an undertaker. Everyone dies.”
I laughed agreeably.
“Laugh if you want, but Mama had steady work until the day she died.”
“She was an undertaker?”
“She was an embalmer’s assistant, and she did makeup on the deceased. But the big money, she said, was in owning your own home.”
By that, I assumed she meant funeral home. But how fitting for the daughter of an embalmer’s assistant to wind up as a mystery and horror writer. Well, they say, write what you know best, and no doubt young Ella had been weaned on talk of the dead.
As much as I would have liked to ask her about her childhood, I had work to do. I smiled pleasantly, and then pretended to start, as if I’d just remembered something.
“Oh, you’ll never guess who I ran into at the Pig.”
“Which Pig?”
Darn those mystery writers, always demanding details. “The Piggly Wiggly down near Kiawah Island.”
“You just don’t run into someone down there,” Ella sniffed. “You’re back to playing amateur sleuth, aren’t you?”
“I’m only an amateur because I’m not being paid. I assure you that I’m quite capable of thinking like a professional.”
“Ha, ha!” Actually, it was more of a bark. Perhaps it just slipped out, because she seemed as surprised by her outburst as I was. Nonetheless, she’d sounded like I imagined Thelma’s Uncle Varney sounded when he was yapping it up with the baboons.
I wanted to tell her that being a hack writer didn’t qualify her either, but shooting myself in the foot, while intensely interesting, has never been fun. Instead, I reached deep into my bag of social niceties and pulled out a lame smile of my own.
“Anyway,” I said, barely moving my lips, “Thelma Maypole was telling me about how y’all divvied up the work at Jane Cox’s house.”
“She complained about having to redo the dining room floor, right?”
“Not exactly. What I—”
“It used to be her house, you know. The Maypoles—all of them—let that beautiful old house just fall apart. Why shouldn’t she get the toughest job? What I can’t believe is that we let your mother talk us into fixing up the place. But she is charming, I’ll grant you that.”
“Mama, or Thelma?”
“Mozella.”
“Yeah, she can charm a snake out of its basket. But back to Thelma—she said your job was the third-floor bathrooms.”
“And that was no small task either. I scraped away five coats of paint on one wall, and three applications of wallpaper on the other walls. And the bottom two layers were the old-fashioned kind of paper that you couldn’t just steam away.”
“And you changed out the faucets,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory.
“So what if I did? They were old and needed replacing.”
“Did you throw them out?”
“No, I planted them in my garden. I hope to grow faucet trees.”
I can’t stand sarcasm—at least not when it’s directed at me. “Make sure you water them well.”
“Of course I threw them out. They were old and scratched.”
“They were also solid gold.”
“What?” She recoiled, and the impressive nose retreated half a zip code.
“If they were anything like the ones upstairs, they were stamped 14 K.”
She was on her feet. “Are you accusing me of stealing them? Is that what this is all about?”
“No, ma’am.”
She may not have heard me. Next thing I knew she’d grabbed a book and threw it at me. Fortunately it was a very slim volume, barely more than a pamphlet, and didn’t really hurt.
I picked it up. Almanac of Intelligent Book Critics the title read.
“This any good?” I asked calmly.
“Out! Get out of my house now!” she shrieked.
I was happy to oblige.
I stopped by the house to retrieve my cell phone. On the way there I got stuck behind a horsedrawn carriage and a garrulous tour guide, so I had some time to think. If the autopsy showed that Golda Feinstein was pregnant, then in my book Chisholm Banncock IX had the strongest motive. Just how he did it was another question. Perhaps he had some old family recipe for poison; no doubt something his ancestors used to get rid of their rivals in the Middle Ages. At any rate, he was smart, quite capable of doing a little research. And killing off his pregnant, lower-class girlfriend in a roomful of eccentric and somewhat contentious people was positively brilliant. Assuming he did it.
Dr. Francis Lloyd Whipperspoonbill had motive as well. The urge for revenge is one of the strongest of human emotions, and unfortunately, there are a whole lot of folks out there who don’t wait for it to be served up cold. Madame Woo-Woo had essentially outed the man before he was ready. How hard would it be for a veterinarian to come up with a lethal substance to dab on a cassette recorder button? About as hard, in my book, as it was to clean a kitty litter tray.
Thelma Maypole had a reason to wreak revenge; but on the doctor, not Madame Woo-Woo. Still, the woman was nuttier than a pecan pie, and I had my doubts she wouldn’t stop at implicating her ex-fiancé in a murder. A woman scorned—well, that’s one cliché that’s true. And this woman knew at least a little something about everything. Coming up with a poison would be a piece of cake for her—perhaps a doughnut, and several cookies as well.
Ella Nolte definitely had a mean streak, as did Hugh Riffle. But Hugh looked to be rolling in dough, while Ella appeared to have outlived her means. I’d always thought writers were rich, but apparently only some are. If Ella discovered that the old Maypole mansion held undisclosed treasures, she might have plotted a way to get her key-tapping fingers on them. She was, after all, an experienced plotter. But why would she kill Madame Woo-Woo? As a diversion? If so, that was yet another failed story line. No wonder her books weren’t available at Barnes & Noble.
And what about Madame Woo-Woo? What did I know about her, except that she was an accomplished hustler, with a small H, who had been orphaned at a relatively young age, and had a brother—wait! Back to that orphan angle. Her parents were both antique dealers. She was raised in a home of historic and beautiful things. Even the trailer she shared with her brother was fabulously furnished. Perhaps her expert eye had
zeroed in on some valuable object, like the tiles, and she had shared her observation with one of the Heavenly Hustlers.
Let’s say the Hustler in question was desperately strapped for cash and thought she could sneak past the rest of the herd—but only if Madame Woo-Woo kept her big trap shut. The poorest Hustler that came to mind was the haughty author, who was obviously living way beyond her means. The next poorest, and this was only conjecture, had to be the veterinarian. Everyone knows they don’t make as much money as people doctors. Of course, he was old money, but that’s been known to run dry. Thelma Maypole was only an investment counselor, but she was old money too—so old, she couldn’t see it in front of her hexagonal glasses. Chisel-cheeked Chiz was loaded, there was no getting around that, which brought me right back to the Riffles. They could be living beyond their means, but I doubted it. Not with all the turnover that bizarre business of his did, at least according to the TV commercials.
Suppose that Lothario decided to dump her? What would an aging beauty queen do under those circumstances? Try to find work posing for wrinkle-removal ads? Do television commercials for gentle laxatives? Or maybe take the laxative commercial one step further and advertise adult diapers? At any rate, divorced women are often at the bottom of the financial heap—wait just one cotton-picking minute!
The evening I first met Sondra Riffle she was wearing a brightly colored frog pin on her lapel. And when I visited her in the elegant but palatial house on the Battery, there was a terrarium in the powder room, along with Hugh’s car stuff. Undoubtedly the car motif was his idea, but the terrarium could have been hers. And there were live icky things in it too. I didn’t look closely at the time, but those could have been frogs. Somehow I’d gotten the impression they were salamanders.
The horsedrawn carriage I’d been stuck behind got out of my way. I’m ashamed to say this, but I broke the speed limit getting the rest of the way home. Mama wasn’t home, but there was at least one message on my machine. I decided to ignore it until after I’d made my call.
“Scrubb,” he said, picking up on the first ring.
His quick response caught me off guard. “Uh—Abby Timberlake—no, I mean Abby Washburn. You know who I mean. Did Greg call you?”
