by Lesley Kagen
After Doc gave thanks to the Lord for the food we were about to receive, he commented on how lovely the table looked, thanked Aunt Jane May for preparing the meal, then turned to me. “Are you and your friends enjoying your summer vacation, Elizabeth?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. We’re having a swell time,” I said, but I thought how quickly that could change if Evelyn Mulrooney got her way at the emergency meeting.
The girls and I were so desperate to head over to the town hall after supper that I was tempted to ask Doc for permission, but Aunt Jane May would go purple in the face if I undercut her and would strongly “suggest” we meet out in the kitchen. I could find myself washing dishes and polishing silver for the rest of the night and I couldn’t risk that. Frankie, Viv, and I had plans. Big plans. I already saw myself as the weakest line of our threesome and I couldn’t bear being the one who threw a monkey wrench into them.
From his seat next to mine, the sheriff of Grand County tucked his napkin into the top of his tan uniform shirt and said to me, “A penny for your thoughts.”
I grinned at what he’d been saying at the start of Sunday supper as far back as I could remember, then told him what I always had, “Make that a nickel and you got a deal.”
“You drive a hard bargain, kiddo,” he said as he produced one from behind my ear.
Good looks ran in our family, so he turned heads. He had the same coloring as his brother, but he was an inch taller, with a much more powerful physique. He also had darling dimples, was good with a gun, and had a rough-around-the edges way about him that the single ladies in town seemed to find irresistible.
Frankie thought the sheriff did a good job of keeping the peace and treated Mud Towners more fairly than many in town did, but she didn’t care for how opinionated he could be. Viv thought he was a barrel of laughs and got a kick out of his magic tricks. I adored every inch of him except for how he thought of Broadhurst as a dent in the otherwise shiny exterior of our town. Viv was right. He could be so charming. But Frankie was right about him, too. He was a loudmouth, that’s for sure.
I would’ve wagered the nickel he gave me that at some point during the meal he’d start spouting off about one of his favorite topics and reveal some much needed information about tonight’s meeting that might be useful to the girls and me. It wouldn’t take much to get him going. All I had to do to nudge him onto his soapbox was mutter into my napkin just loud enough for him to hear, “Broadhurst.”
“That hospital might look good on the outside, but it’s nothing more than a fruitcake factory, am I right, Biz?” Uncle Walt circled his finger around his ear and waited for me to do the same because, even though we weren’t, he thought we were on the same wavelength. “But,” he added with a grin, “if tonight’s meeting goes like I think it will, that could soon change.”
Oh?” Doc looked up from the piece of cornbread he was buttering. “Why’s that?”
“Evelyn Mulrooney has assured me that she’ll convince folks once and for all that those lunatics are a danger to the town. For God’s sakes, Martha Winchell barely survived that car crash.”
That wasn’t true. That was just one of his big blusters.
Mrs. Winchell was only shaken up the morning she was on her way home from the library when one of the Broadhurst patients popped up in the back seat of her Rambler, pointed at the book she’d checked out, and told her how much he’d enjoyed Gone with the Wind. It wasn’t his fault Old Lady Winchell goosed the gas and ended up in the Schroeders’ front yard with their bird bath doing double duty as a hood ornament.
“Cruikshank acts like my men and I have nothing better to do than round up those escaped patients and drive them back to that loony bin,” the sheriff complained as he carved into his chicken breast with too much vigor. “And the mayor won’t act on my complaints.” He reached for the bowl of mashed potatoes and slapped a generous scoop down onto his plate. “I know you don’t agree with me, Doc, but I’m not the only one in town who thinks it’s time for Bud Kibler to retire. Evelyn Mulrooney is running against him come September, and if she wins, she’s planning to do all she can to shut the hospital down.”
I almost choked on my string beans because that was almost verbatim what Frankie had told Viv and me on our walk home from Mass that morning—only much worse. Not only had Mulrooney scared our neighbors into believing that if it wasn’t for her diligence, they wouldn’t have known Hopper could be headed our way to murder their children, she wanted to further convince them of her mayoral worthiness by leading a charge to close Broadhurst down.
This was such life-changing news, not only for the girls and me and poor Bud Kibler, but for the patients we’d grown to care about. I was dying to hear more, but Uncle Walt was ready to move onto another one of his favorite Sunday supper topics—Aunt Jane May’s home cooking.
He leveled his bachelor blues at her and said, “Janie”—that’s what he called her—“nobody does spuds half as good as you and they’re especially fine tonight.”
Aunt Jane May had an aversion to bragging, but being from the South and all, hospitality was her Eleventh Commandment, so I expected her to politely thank him for the compliment and quickly move onto another topic. What I hadn’t anticipated was seeing a rosy blush rise up from the scooped collar of her pretty lilac dress when she told him, “I tried foldin’ in a cup of sour cream this time. Glad you like them.”
She was humble, but not the demure type, and as I watched that blush crawl toward her neck, I wondered what the heck was going on. A few weeks ago she’d turned the color of her red clutch purse at the breakfast table, and here she was almost fuchsia at the supper table. Is she allergic to cooking? Does she have scarlet fever?
But that was stupid. That didn’t make sense.
She’d been cooking her whole life without a deleterious reaction, and a nursing diploma from the University of Mississippi hung on her bedroom wall. She knew scarlet fever was contagious and wouldn’t think of spreading it around, and she didn’t appear to have any other symptoms. Her appetite was hearty, and she wasn’t listless or glassy-eyed. Other than the blush that’d charged all the way to her cheeks, Aunt Jane May looked like a million bucks. Just like Viv told her she did the morning she’d read her that pretend fortune about Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome and … O, Mary, sweet mother of God.
That could not be a coincidence.
Had Aunt Jane May been trotting hotly with a man who was no longer a mystery because he was sitting next to me at the dining room table? Did she forbid the girls and me to ride over the tracks because she and Uncle Walt had been secretly meeting at Earl Spooner’s Club after dark? Was that her lip-licking secret?
Of course, I was completely bowled over by that possible turn of events and reversal of roles, but I understood why she’d want to keep that from us. Frankie and I would keep our traps shut, but Viv had been acting so impetuously that she couldn’t be counted on anymore to keep a secret. And given what the girls told me that afternoon about Mulrooney setting her matrimonial sights on Uncle Walt, if Viv found out that he and Aunt Jane May were dating each other, she might tell Mulrooney for the pure satisfaction of seeing her suffer, and that wouldn’t work out so hot.
Snug in the hideout, Frankie, Viv, and I had heard the president ranting during one of the Auxiliary meetings held in our living room, “I’ve been told they’re dancing to jungle music at that club across the tracks. The Lord wants us to do something about that, ladies. We’ll be making picket signs at the next meeting. We need to close that place down.”
If any of those purported do-gooders should happen to march in front of Earl’s back door and see Aunt Jane May dancing the night away with Uncle Walt, that’d be disastrous. She’d get kicked out of the Auxiliary. Blackballed. The same way Mrs. Joan Abernathy had been when, after one too many cocktails at the church Christmas party, she’d sashayed over to Father Casey, undid the top buttons of her Peter Pan blouse, and asked him if he’d like to take a peek at Never Neverland.
> The girls and I thought that was hilarious, but the religious ladies weren’t known for their sense of humor. They started one of their whisper campaigns, and by the time they got done putting Mrs. Abernathy through the wringer, she couldn’t show her face in town. She and her family had to move to Port Washington.
That’s not the fate that’d befall Aunt Jane May, of course. As powerful as Mulrooney was, she’d never get rid of the matriarch of the Buchanan family. But she would do all she could to tarnish our aunt’s sterling reputation. Nobody looked down on a man who sowed his wild oats before he tied the knot, but a single gal like Aunt Jane May was supposed to stay unplowed. Mulrooney would drag her name through the mud—in the name of Jesus Christ, of course—if she found out that my aunt and uncle were pressing against each other at Earl Spooner’s Club. She could even spread around what her daughter Brenda had told the girls and me at the park yesterday after I beat her at tetherball, “You think you’re such a big deal, Buchanan, because your relative discovered the town, but my ma thinks your aunt is doin’ unnatural acts with your uncle and she’s gonna tell everyone in town.”
I could tell by the venom in her voice and Viv’s volcanic reaction that she had insulted and threatened our loved ones, but I had no idea what she meant by “unnatural acts,” so Frankie had to keep Viv from gouging Brenda’s eyes out and explain to me at the same time, “Her mother told her that Auntie and Uncle Walt are …” she thrust her pelvis forward and backward a bunch of times.
“Hula-hooping?” I guessed, because that’s what it looked like and it’d be a pretty unnatural act for them to do.
“For the love of God!” Viv yelled as she struggled to get free of Frankie’s grip. “This little shit is sayin’ that her ma is gonna tell everyone that Auntie and Uncle Walt are doin’ what the Willis’s and the Harris’s dogs are always doin’ and—let me at her!”
Then again, I thought, as I went back to studying Aunt Jane May across the dining room table on the night of the emergency meeting, I might be making a big deal out of nothing. She’d just finished slaving away in a steamy kitchen during record-breaking heat, so her rosy cheeks could be nothing more than a prickly rash. And even if my uncle raved about her cooking, enjoyed watching the Gillette Friday Night Fights with her and, by all reports, had a ball twirling her around the dance floor at the May Mixer, that didn’t mean they were in love.
Did it?
I’d lost my mother, and my father wouldn’t dream of replacing her, so I never had the opportunity to watch a man and woman romance each other close-up. But I had observed enough couples holding hands or snuggling during a Music Under the Stars concert or smooching in the balcony at the Rivoli to know that kind of love could be a many-splendored thing.
But then, what about Mrs. Merchant, who used to show up on our front porch in the middle of the night when her husband busted her nose or broke her rib? And no matter how many shifts Mr. Ellis worked at the dairy, his wife shared her displeasure on payday with anyone who was within screaming distance.
I guess about the only thing I knew for sure about love and marriage was, if our aunt and uncle had fallen for each other, the girls and I wouldn’t be trying on flower girl dresses at Suzy’s Bridal Shop. Aunt Jane May would never say “I do” and move into his bungalow on Chestnut Street, not in the near future anyway. She’d stepped into her sister’s shoes to raise me and tend to her brother-in-law’s hearth and home and she’d never relinquish those commitments.
And what would happen after she said no to Uncle Walt’s proposal? Would he drop her and break her heart? If another man pulled a stunt like that, the Tree Musketeers would come up with a suitable punishment for the louse, but would that same principle apply to a member of our family? Who would the girls and I owe our allegiance to? Both of them? If so, that could turn into a mess of biblical proportions. I could almost see Solomon’s sword hanging over—
“Elizabeth Augusta Buchanan!” Judging by how hard Aunt Jane May kicked my foot under the dining room table, it wasn’t the first time. “Have you gone stone-deaf?”
I snapped to. “No, ma’am.”
“Then do what I told you to.”
I’d been a million miles away and had no idea what she was talking about. I was tempted to compliment her, the way Viv would have, but I wasn’t fast on my feet like she was. “Sorry,” I said. “Come again?”
“We’re waiting on you to fetch the pie from the kitchen,” Aunt Jane May said through clenched teeth. “The way I asked you to five minutes ago and three before that.”
I should’ve been mortified that she’d reprimanded me in front of my father and uncle, but I was grateful she’d brought me back to the here and now, and I jumped out of my chair and said, “Back in two shakes!”
I’d spent entirely too much time plying my uncle for information about the emergency meeting and imagining a dire future for Aunt Jane May, and not nearly enough time rehearsing my lines for a command performance that might take place after supper. If I didn’t play my part to Viv’s satisfaction, she might start practicing her noose-making again. Only this time, she’d have my neck in mind.
Chapter Six
Despite the unpredictability swirling around the girls and me, there were some things we could still count on.
We knew that once Doc and Uncle Walt made quick work of their cherry pie slices, as was their custom after every Sunday supper, they’d excuse themselves. They’d go out back to smoke cigars and talk brother to brother in bentwood chairs set beneath a sycamore tree because Aunt Jane May wouldn’t let them smoke in the house.
Soon as they were out of the picture, I did what I’d promised the girls I’d do before we parted ways that afternoon. After Aunt Jane May and I cleared the dishes off the dining room table, as was our custom, she filled the kitchen sink with hot water, and I got busy trying to change her mind while she washed and I dried.
“Father Casey told us at Mass this morning that he expected everyone to attend the emergency meeting and … what if one of us gets run over by a car when we’re playin’ kick the can tonight?” I said. “We’d go straight to hell for disobeying a direct order from a priest. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?”
Aunt Jane May nudged a curl off her cheek with the back of her soapy hand and said with a bemused snort, “Think you girls will ever get it through your heads that when I say no I don’t mean maybe?” She passed me a slippery china saucer. “That day ever comes, be sure to let me know, all right? I’m plannin’ on contacting Ripley’s Believe it or Not.”
About the time I was stacking the last of the dishes, Frankie and Viv must’ve smelled Doc’s and Uncle Walt’s smoke signal. Usually, when the cigar fumes floated over to their yards on Sunday nights, they’d come grab me, and we’d play a board game in the hideout until Ed Sullivan’s show came on because we really liked jugglers and Viv was trying to learn ventriloquism from Señor Wences.
But that Sunday night, the girls were standing outside the screen door to find out if I’d succeeded in obtaining Aunt Jane May’s approval to attend the town hall meeting. After I snuck my hand out from behind the dish towel and gave them the thumbs down, the plan Viv had come up with to discover what Mulrooney had up her sleeve was set in motion.
Besides striking beauty and a superior intellect, Frankie had better than twenty/twenty vision, so she always served as our lookout and scout. She jumped off the back porch and skipped toward the tire Uncle Walt had hung from a branch of the hideout tree with a thick nautical rope. Per Viv’s direction, Frankie was to act like she was having a gay old time, but what she was really doing—her ulterior motive—was keeping her eye on the Buchanan brothers. When they snubbed their cigars out, it’d mean they were about to head back to Doc’s study for their post-dinner whiskey before they left for the meeting. Frankie’s job was to let Viv and me know when they were on the move. If we heard her whippoorwill whistle, we were to drop whatever we were doing, meet her out front of the house, and run like hell.
Viv’s role was to mislead Aunt Jane May about where we’d be when she and Doc and the sheriff were at the meeting and our little actress played it to the hilt. She came bursting through the screen door, snatched a shortbread cookie out of the jar, and delivered her opening line with one of those toothy smiles of hers. “Mmm … mmm … mmm. If you don’t enter these cookies in the County Fair this year, Auntie, I swear I will.” She turned toward me then and said so smoothly, so convincingly, that for a moment I thought she’d called the plan off, “I heard the Olly Olly Oxen call on my way over here. If we don’t want ’em to start without us, we gotta get a move on. Go change your clothes, and I’ll grab Frankie.”
We couldn’t risk my family seeing us heading downtown instead of up the block, so the next part of Viv’s plan called for us to say our good nights and then conceal ourselves behind the six-foot hedge that separated the Buchanans’ property from the Maniachis’. After we heard Aunt Jane May, the sheriff, and Doc leave for the town hall, so would we.
That all went without a hitch, and we were so pleased with our efforts that instead of staying focused on the job at hand, we acted like the three eleven-year-olds we were. We were doing this little celebratory bunny hop dance we did after things went our way when Viv suddenly stopped, pointed toward the lush vegetable garden in the Maniachis’ backyard, and said, “Aww, damnit to hell and back. I forgot about Uncle Sally.”
Not factoring him into the plan was flat out negligent on Viv’s part, and Frankie and I should’ve taken him into consideration, too, because it wasn’t like he’d ambushed us. During the warm months, we could almost always find him in his backyard garden that time of night watering or pinching suckers off his tomato plants and singing an Enrico Caruso aria or an Ole Blue Eyes tune.
