Optical Delusions in Deadwood

by Ann Charles

  “You didn’t touch them, did you?”

  “Ummm, why?”

  That didn’t bode well. “You don’t know where those teeth have been, Addelyn.”

  “Layne said you told him they’d been in an attic for a long time.”

  Of course she’d take me literally. “I meant before that.”

  “Mother, you’re overreacting. Just relax.”

  Rather than sentence my daughter to her bedroom for eternity, I searched for my Zen. “Where’s Aunt Zoe?”

  Addy shrugged, popped her pink bubble gum, and then skipped off toward the living room where the television blared.

  I found Aunt Zoe in her workshop. Handing her the locket, I asked if she recognized the man or the boy, or saw any kind of resemblance to a potential modern-day relative. But like Harvey, she didn’t have a clue about either one’s identity.

  Another dead end. Lovely.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon sorting teeth with Addy and Layne—all of us wearing gloves this time—and speculating to myself about the teeth’s origin and purpose, still baffled. The pointy canines reminded me of another enigma in my life, also one with whom I needed to wear gloves when handling: Lila.

  Douglas Mann hadn’t called me back by suppertime. I checked my messages, just to be sure, but came up empty. After Ray’s not-so-glowing raves about Douglas, I contemplated turning my phone off. But there was always the chance that Doc would call, dying with some animalistic need for me, craving my touch.

  Yeah, right. Oh, look, there’s a flying pig.

  Chuckling at my own sarcasm, I silenced the ringer instead, putting it on vibrate mode.

  Over a crispy, peppery chicken-fried steak, I asked Aunt Zoe, “Do you mind watching the kids for an hour this evening while I attend Eloise Tarkin’s viewing with Natalie?” Asking was more of a formality. Aunt Zoe’s gallery was closed on Mondays. On top of that, she and the kids loved to catch some National Geographic show on Monday nights, watching to see if my brother’s name showed up in the credits, which it did sometimes.

  “Sure. Eloise’s husband used to deliver mail out Natalie’s way, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah.” I mentally shook my head at how small Deadwood could be and chewed on my last savory bite.

  “Don’t hurry home.” She sipped on her glass of homemade lemonade. “The kids and I have a date with some snakes tonight.”

  What a coincidence. I’d discussed bra cup sizes with a snake this afternoon.

  “You and Natalie should enjoy a girls’ night out.”

  “Aunt Zoe, it’s a viewing.”

  “Well, don’t feel like you have to rush home. The kids and I will be just fine on our own.”

  “If I ever win the lotto, I’m splitting it with you even-steven.” I dropped a kiss on her head and then raced up the stairs to don my black.

  At five minutes after seven, I parked my Bronco on the street in front of Mudder Brothers. Apparently, Eloise Tarkin was a popular lady because there were no spots free in the parking lot. After one last check in the rearview mirror to refresh my lipstick and tuck in hairs that had escaped from my French knot, I climbed out into the early evening air.

  Even though the sun was heading out for the night, leaving behind long shadows, warm waves of air still rose from the pavement, heating my ankles and calves. The rumble of motorcycles drowned out the usual summer early evening sounds of humming lawnmowers and laughing children. The smell of exhaust mingled with pine trees, cut grass, and baked asphalt. I crossed the parking lot, Mudder Brothers open front doors beckoning.

  Natalie’s pickup was nowhere to be seen, so when she called my name, for a moment I thought I imagined it.

  “Violet! Over here.”

  Natalie sat on one of the little bench seats next to an ashtray-trash can combination on the far right side of the porch. The acrid smell of burning tobacco brought me to an abrupt stop several feet from her. “Are you smoking?”

  She nodded, picking up the cigarette and drawing on it.

  “Why?” Natalie had quit smoking three years ago after a decade-long battle. As I stared at her, her eyes filled with tears. I dropped down next to her on the bench, my gut clenching in anxiety. “What’s wrong, Nat?”

  She blew her lungful of smoke away from me and swiped at her eyes. “It’s nothing, really. It’s silly. I feel stupid.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, we never even had anything real.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve come to realize it was all in my imagination.”

  “Natalie, you’re killing me. What?”

  She leaned her head on my shoulder and sniffed. “It’s Doc.”

  The chicken-fried steak Aunt Zoe made for dinner threatened to revisit my back molars. “What about him?”

  “He’s not in love with me.”

  “You’re not making sense.” Had Doc talked to her about us?

  “I saw him tonight.”

  “And?”

  She sighed. “I parked over next to his office, thinking I’d drop in on him and say hi if he was working late.”

  Hands clenched, I hung on her every word.

  “He was working late, but he wasn’t alone.”

  Come again? “Who was he with?” I tried to sound like a concerned friend instead of a jealousy-crazed lover. “And where?” In his back room?

  “I don’t know who she is, but she has gorgeous red hair and a tight little ass, nothing even close to my Amazonian body.” Natalie puffed on her cigarette again.

  Oh, God, not Tiffany, Doc’s flame-haired ex-Realtor and ex-bedmate. Please not Tiffany. “Did you actually catch them kissing?” I swallowed bitter bile. “Or doing something else?”

  Another long breath of smoke billowed from her lungs. “They were standing next to her car, hugging good-bye.”

  “Well, that could mean something completely platonic.” I said, trying to convince the both of us. I hugged my arms to my chest to ease the ache growing there.

  “Then I overheard her say how glad she was that they were back together—and they kissed.”

  “That son of a bitch!”

  Chapter Twelve

  There was a trick to comforting my best friend after her heart had been broken by my lover when she caught him kissing his ex-lover.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t capable of performing that trick. I was a little busy keeping my own beating organ in one piece at hearing about my soon-to-be ex-lover’s wandering lips.

  Holy shit.

  What a fucking mess.

  Where was the tequila?

  I wanted to race to my Bronco, tear ass over to Doc’s office, and pound on his chest. But I couldn’t leave Natalie here alone, smoking her way through heartache. So I held it all in—the stabs of jealousy, the spasms of hurt, the tears of rage. One breath after another, I rode out the choppy waves of betrayal until I could speak without grinding my molars.

  “I know just the thing to cheer you up,” I said, squeezing Natalie’s shoulder. “A dead body. Let’s go look at it.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette, grabbed her crutches, and hobbled after me. What a trooper.

  In the foyer I caught a whiff of something medicinal. I sniffed again. Embalming fluid? I recoiled, then noticed two huge bouquets of lilies on pedestal stands just inside the French doors leading to the parlor. Oh, thank God, it was just stinky flowers. There was a reason I preferred daisies.

  The parlor room was two-thirds full of whispering, sniffling mourners. The other third of the room contained bouquets bursting with color, displayed in wreaths and sprays and vases. A chilled breeze of air conditioning spilled out over us, making me wish I’d remembered to grab the shawl that went with the black velvet tank dress I had on for tonight’s main event.

  “Do you see George?” I whispered to Natalie when she joined me in the parlor entrance.

  She craned her neck. “No. He’s probably in back, prepping.”

  “Prepping what? I can see Mrs. Tarkin from her
e.” Well, her folded hands, anyway, which was plenty.

  “I don’t know, someone else. Come on.” Before I could object, she crutched inside and plopped down in a seat in the back of the room. Déjà vu, I thought, and joined her.

  I’d just settled in when a familiar, but strangely out of place, classical piece of organ music began pulsing from the speakers in the top corners of the room.

  “That’s weird,” I said under my breath.

  “What’s weird?”

  “This song. Who plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor at a viewing?” My mother was a classical music groupie, so I grew up being force-fed long-dead composers.

  “That’s Bach?” Natalie asked. “It reminds me of the old black and white horror movies we used to watch in your parents’ basement during sleepovers.”

  “I know. Those spooky organ riffs along with these one-way windows and Mrs. Tarkin’s corpse are all creeping me out.” I showed her the goosebumps on my arms.

  “That’s just the damned air conditioning. If it gets much colder in here, we’ll all be stiffs.”

  I rubbed my arms. “Add some candlelight, and I could just see Mrs. Tarkin rising up from her casket and saying, ‘I vant to suck your blood.’”

  Natalie giggled. “Hey, look,” she pointed at the front of the room. “There’s George.”

  I had a feeling George was responsible for the sinister-sounding Bach tune. All these years of dressing up dead folks had to have warped his mind. I could see his tiny yellow teeth as he greeted viewers. As if he felt my stare, his gaze roved in our direction, landing on me, then Natalie.

  She waved.

  I attempted a smile.

  He excused himself from his guests.

  “Here he comes,” I said through my frozen smile. George was pausing here and there along the way to shake hands or deliver pats on the back. “Act natural.”

  “Natural? We’re at a funeral, Vi. Not a bar.”

  “Fine, then act sad for Mrs. Tarkin. But not too sad.”

  “No problem. I’ll just think about Doc.”

  I’d think about Doc, too, and the uppercut I was going to aim at that sexy cleft in his chin the next time I saw him. “Don’t think of Doc, think of Junior and that tattoo. The sooner you ask George about it, the sooner we can get the hell out of here.”

  George dropped into one of the seats in the empty row in front of us, resting his forearm across the back of the chair. “Two viewings in less than a week, Natalie. I’m shocked.”

  “Me, too,” Natalie muttered.

  I poked her in the ribs. She flinched.

  “George, you remember my friend Violet? She’s the one selling the Carhart house.”

  Nice. Natalie was building up to Junior’s tattoo, I could feel it.

  “Sure. Violet, who likes my gables.” He held out his hand.

  Criminy. I’d forgotten about my foot-in-mouth disease the last time I’d talked to him. His palm was warm and sweaty when I shook it. I counted to three and pulled away, trying to wipe the sweat on my dress without him noticing. “Nice choice of music. Is there an organist hiding behind this one-way glass?”

  Natalie cleared her throat and kicked me in the anklebone with her cast-free foot, making me jerk in pain. Ouch!

  “Nope.” George grinned, showing us those tiny yellow teeth and big gums up close. I held in my wince—barely. “Just Eddie and his media center. He has a big repertoire of organ music.”

  “Eddie is George’s brother,” Natalie explained to me.

  I pretended that was news to me, even though I knew all about Eddie. I knew all about George, too, and his very nasty, very public divorce from one of the descendants of Deadwood’s founding fathers. What I didn’t know was what had been in that crate Ray and George had loaded in Ray’s SUV last month. But I hoped to find out shortly.

  “Is Eddie back there right now?” I asked, “watching us through the glass?” Talk about creepy.

  “No, he’s downstairs cleaning up.”

  Cleaning up what? Did they do autopsies down there?

  “Do you two split the duties around here?” I could see Natalie’s frown out of the corner of my eyes. I’d disrupted her tattoo segue. Oops.

  “Yes. Eddie’s in charge of all the technical aspects of viewings and services. I tend to deal with the public.”

  And who worked with Ray on the shady little side business they had going? Just George, or both brothers?

  George’s mention of technical stuff reminded me of something he’d said during our last viewing adventure. “George, you don’t happen to have another copy of that video of the Carhart funeral that Junior’s fiancée requested, do you?”

  George hesitated, his forehead furrowing.

  Before he could question why I of all people was asking, I threw out, “Wanda Carhart wanted me to ask.”

  “I already gave a copy of it to the fiancée.”

  Ah, ha. So he had an original somewhere. “That’s what Wanda said. But in all the post-funeral hubbub, it seems they’ve misplaced it.”

  “Oh,” his forehead cleared now that I’d smoothed everything over. “Well, sure. I could make another copy for Wanda. Do you need it tonight?”

  “Yes, please, if it’s not too much of a problem. I could deliver it tomorrow when I take some paperwork to Wanda.”

  George stood. “Okay, give me just a moment. I’ll have to go to my office and burn a copy for you.”

  I elbowed Natalie and nudged my head in George’s direction.

  She grabbed his hand before he could leave. “George, we need to talk to you about something else regarding the Carharts.”

  “You do? What?”

  “It’s kind of private.” She glanced at the other mourners. “Can we talk in your office?”

  “Sure. Just follow me.”

  “I need to use the Ladies room first,” I said, rising. “I’ll be right with you two.”

  A silver-haired, sad-faced man interrupted at that moment, nodding a hello at Natalie before asking George about some programs for his aunt’s funeral.

  I leaned over and whispered in Natalie’s ear. “Keep him busy in his office for five minutes. Don’t let him leave.”

  “Five minutes?” She said it as if that was one minute shy of an eternity.

  “You’re right. That’s too short. Make it ten.”

  “Ten? How am I supposed to keep him in his office that long when there’s a viewing going on?”

  “I don’t know. Be resourceful.” I glanced down at her black silk blouse. “Take your shirt off.”

  “What! Oh, Jesus. That’s gross. He’s practically my uncle.”

  “Fine. Leave your shirt on, then, and talk about your Aunt Beatrix. He’s got the hots for her. I could tell when he asked about her last time.”

  “Where are you going to be for these ten minutes?”

  I nodded at the wall of one-way glass.

  Natalie rolled her eyes. “You’re crazy. What do you think you’re going to find back there? A smoking gun with Ray’s name on it?”

  “Maybe. For all we know there could be two smoking guns back there.”

  “You’re gonna get caught with your hand in the cookie jar. You always do.”

  “Not always.” Just 99.9 percent of the time. “I’ll see you in a jiff.”

  I headed out the parlor doors, making sure George wasn’t watching when I made a left turn instead of a right toward the bathroom.

  Two doors down, I overshot the storage room and found a storage closet instead, lined with shelves full of old-looking, oversized leather-bound books. I was tempted to pull one down and open it, but the clock was ticking, so I tiptoed back out and quietly closed the door behind me.

  I backtracked one door, found it unlocked, and slipped inside. This time, I hit the mark.

  Shrouded in semi-gloom with the only light coming from the parlor through the one-way glass, the room was divided in half. One side held four rows of chairs, all facing the parlor windows—a pr
ivate viewing area for family and close friends. The other side held true to the storage part of the room’s name: shelves full of Kleenex boxes, racks of vases of all sorts and colors, stacks of folded wreath-supporting tripods, and more. Everything a girl could need to throw a first-rate viewing.

  The organ music was muted slightly, but still audible. I sniffed, a trick I learned from Doc. My gut twinged just thinking about him, so I shoved that whole mess to the back of my mind. The room smelled musty with a hint of cardboard, like most storage rooms. No dead body smells here.

  I tiptoed across the carpet, then remembered that the glass was one-way. I could break-dance for all the folks on the other side cared. Against the far wall, next to a fancy-looking rack of stereo equipment, sat the two big wooden crates that matched the one Ray and George loaded into Ray’s SUV last month. They were stacked end-to-end. I could see that both lids were loose.

  I shoved aside the first lid and found nothing but an empty crate. I replaced the lid and moved to the second. This crate contained a small cooler like what Aunt Zoe used to keep the worms chilled and subdued when she took the kids fishing. Only this Mudder Brothers cooler had a big red biohazard sticker on it. Being that I was standing inside a funeral home, my imagination came up with lots of body pieces that could fit in that cooler.

  As much as I didn’t want to open the cooler, I had to. The red lid popped off easily, the inside empty, not a speck of blood that I could see in the dim light. I blew out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  I put the cooler back the way I’d found it and started to close the lid on the second crate when I heard a voice on the other side of the door. Through the one-way glass, I saw a man who looked very much like George Mudder, only taller and thinner with extra-prominent cheekbones—a lot like Lurch from the Addams Family. That had to be brother Eddie.

  Yikes!

  In a panic, I did what any rational single mother in her mid-thirties would do when on the verge of being caught snooping in a funeral home’s storage room. I threw my little velvet purse in the crate and scrambled in after it—hearing something rip in the process—then closed the lid over my head.