Finger Lickin' Dead

by Riley Adams

  Lulu said, “I wonder if the groom has a website and what he’s asking for?”

  Cherry covered her ears with manicured hands. “La, la, la! It’s too much! It’s boggling my mind!”

  “The groom has a very nice, very discreet little website,” said Flo. “He’s looking for donations for the honeymoon and the rehearsal dinner.”

  There was a collective groan from the group.

  Flo said, “But never mind all that, y’all! If you want to make a little gift, I’m sure they’d be happy with any little thank-you . . . like a tin of nuts or a fruit basket, or something like that.” But she sounded less than sure.

  “Anyway,” Flo continued brightly, “I’m going to send everybody a joint e-mail about times to arrive at the wedding and the schedule for setting equipment up and all of that.” She sent around a piece of paper to get everyone’s e-mail address. “Because things do go wrong all the time. Some of it we can help, and then I’ll feel better about the stuff we can’t help—like the way my photographer is sick.”

  Evelyn said, “Holden isn’t feeling well?”

  “No. Well, I guess he’s feeling well, but he’s not sounding well. His voice is like . . . gone. Just a weird squeak is all. He warbled out something about having laryngitis when I called this morning to check in with him.”

  Lulu frowned. “That doesn’t really matter, does it? Does he really need his voice?”

  “But if you think about it, the photographer does need to talk. He needs to call out for everybody to watch the cake get cut or tell the mom’s side of the family that they’re going to be the focus for the next picture. You know. The photographer is kind of a director.” Flo looked seriously peeved.

  “Tell you what,” said Peggy Sue eagerly. “If I see some movement toward the wedding cake, I’ll holler at everybody. I’m all about the cake, honey.”

  “I’m all about the cake if it’s good cake. Some of those wedding cakes look really pretty, but they taste just like cardboard,” said Lulu with a face.

  “This will be delicious cake. That’s because Tommie said she’d make it for us when the baker backed out,” said Flo.

  “They upset the baker, too?” demanded Cherry.

  “These people seem to have a God-given talent for making folks upset,” said Flo with a shrug of her shoulders. “Who am I to argue with a gift?”

  Chapter 17

  Flo said, between her teeth, “It’s going to be perfect . A beautiful wedding.”

  “It’s hardly even enough rain to dampen your hair,” said Lulu in a soothing tone. “And the temperature will drop a little with these clouds and things will just feel so much better.” Which was, of course, a total lie. Rain in the Southern heat meant humidity—not cooler temperatures.

  Flo appreciated the lie and smiled at Lulu. “Thanks. I’ve just got to calm down and not get all wound up about stuff I don’t have any control over.”

  The bride’s mother, Cynthia, marched up to Flo. It was clear she was not going to try to calm down. “They’re all coming! All of them!”

  Flo put a well-manicured hand to her throat. “The guests? They’re all coming? They can’t all be coming! Almost half of them didn’t even RSVP and then there were about thirty of them that said for sure that they weren’t going to be here at all.”

  “Well, maybe,” said Cynthia in a sarcastic voice, “I’m just imagining things, but it sure does look like my friends and relatives out there, coming in on the shuttles.”

  “But we’re not going to have enough food! Or seats at the reception! And the chapel only seats seventy-five. . . . Any more than that and it’ll be standing-room only.”

  “I’m not paying you good money for me to worry about this,” said Cynthia with hard eyes. “You just make sure it all works out. I want this wedding perfect.” She stalked off.

  “Okay,” said Lulu, “Calm down, Flo. We’ll make the best of this, honey. Why don’t you take care of the chapel seating, since that comes first. Ask the Graceland coordinator for folding chairs. It’ll work out—I’m sure these folks are going to see what’s happened and will let the older guests sit down. And so what if there are people standing in the back? The ceremony will only be twenty-five minutes, tops.”

  “What about the food?” asked Flo nervously.

  “Just leave that up to Ben and Oliver. We’ll call Derrick and have him bring some more food from the restaurant. We have this sort of thing happen all the time, Flo—in the restaurant business you never really know how many people you’ll have to feed that day. Sometimes we get swamped, too.”

  For a while, “making do” went pretty well. Flo felt calmer about her last-minute emergency—until she spilled a large container of sweet tea on the front of her dress. She cursed and said, “What the heck am I going to do now? I can’t go to the ceremony like this!”

  It did look like Flo had had some sort of restroom accident, thought Lulu. Cherry jumped in with a rescue line. “Come on, Flo—you can borrow my dress. We’ll trade out in the restroom and I’ll hang out in there for a while and dry yours with the hand dryer.”

  Flo was beyond caring that Cherry had on a banana yellow dress with a large print of hot peppers covering it. “Bless you, Cherry! I just need something dry.” A few minutes later, Flo was back out, dashing around with her clipboard and Cherry was standing in the restroom in her slip drying Flo’s dress under the hand dryers.

  Lulu called Derrick’s cell phone. “Hon? Could you run into the kitchen and see how much food we’ve got already prepared or what can be cooked up real quick?” She waited for a minute while Derrick rattled off a list of the available foods. “What? Okay, that’ll have to do. Can you bring most of that pork over and all the sides? We’ve got more guests than we bargained for. If I have to shortchange everybody on the barbeque a little, I can make up for it with more sides. Oh, and however much tea you can bring over, too.” She stopped. “You know, that’s going to be too much stuff for you to handle. Why don’t you call Peaches over to help you bring it by?”

  Derrick said reluctantly, “I’m not so sure. She might be in the middle of doing something else, since it’s Saturday.” He paused. “Oh. Actually, she just walked into the restaurant, so never mind. I’ll see if she can help me out.”

  Lulu popped into the restroom to see how things were going. Cherry still stood there, holding Flo’s dress under the dryer. “It’s coming along,” she said. “But it’s slow.”

  Peggy Sue and Evelyn both hurried into the room. “At least our part is all done! The flowers are all set and they look beautiful, y’all!” said Peggy Sue, beaming as she rummaged in her pocketbook for a lipstick.

  “What are you doing about the extra tables that we need for the reception?” asked Lulu.

  Evelyn waved her hand dismissively. “Well, you can’t whip up extra flowers just thirty minutes before the reception starts. We put some magnolia blossoms and greenery on the table and they looked just fine.”

  Peggy Sue gave a nervous giggle. “It’s been kind of a disaster so far, hasn’t it? What kind of people don’t RSVP to a wedding and then show up? Don’t they know that’ll mess everybody up?”

  “And I expected the batty bride, crazy mother, and silent groom to be weird, but what’s eating Oliver today?” asked Evelyn. “He’s acting really odd himself. He’s white as a sheet, keeps looking over his shoulder, and then on top of it all, his mind has clearly been somewhere else.”

  “Maybe it’s the guilt eating him alive,” intoned Peggy Sue. “Maybe he’s the killer! And he’s on the lookout for his next victim. Watch out, Graceland!”

  “Or maybe,” said Lulu in a dry voice, “he’s just not feeling well. God forbid that’s the case, because I can’t really afford to lose any kitchen help today. Maybe I should go out and check on him.” She had turned to go out the restroom door when the door opened abruptly in her face, making her scoot back a couple of feet.

  Flo was there, hair wild like she’d been running her fingers throug
h it. “Flowers! Flowers for the extra tables! Tablecloths! Ohmigod, tablecloths!”

  Evelyn said, “Honey, it’s all been handled.”

  “What? How . . .”

  “It’s been handled. It looks good! Just go and worry about something else, okay? Oh . . . and do something about your hair. It looks like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

  Flo pushed past Cherry to the mirror. She put down a pile of notebooks on the counter and ran her hands through her hair. “Better?” she asked Evelyn.

  Evelyn just stared at her. “Better if you’re trying to look worse.”

  Peggy Sue said, “For heaven’s sake, Flo! Stand still a second.” And Peggy Sue pulled a loaded cosmetic bag out of her enormous pocketbook. She took out a brush and expertly whipped Flo’s hair into a semblance of its normal self. “And you can use some color, too—you look like hell, honey.” She squinted at Flo’s dress and shook her head. “Here’s my red lipstick. . . . Try it on.”

  Flo leaned into the mirror and ran the lipstick over her mouth. “Got to go,” she said, dashing back out the door.

  “That’s my signal, too.” Lulu sighed. “I’d better go across the street and make sure that meat and those sides got here. And that Oliver isn’t off being sick somewhere, I guess. Evelyn, can you give me a hand? I’m thinking we could go ahead and fill some tea glasses while the ceremony is going on.”

  “I’ll come help, too, as soon as this dress looks presentable,” said Cherry, nodding at the still sopping party dress.

  Derrick and Peaches were just unloading the last of the food when Lulu walked up to them. Ben stood there with arms crossed. “These folks are going to have to wait a little while until the extra food is cooked. That’s the problem with not getting an accurate head count.”

  The Graceland wedding coordinator who’d been checking in with Ben said, “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about it. We’ve got the bar set up over here and this crowd looks like they’ll be happy to visit and have a couple of drinks for a little while. And they’re right here in the car museum, so they can walk around and look at Elvis’s pink Cadillac or his motorcycles . . . or the pink Jeep. There’s going to be plenty for them to do.” She looked at her watch. “I’d better head over to the ceremony.” She looked across the road at Graceland and stared. “Is that a woman in a slip running across the front yard?”

  Evelyn drawled, “Clarice, you should be able to recognize that red hair. It’s your very own docent, Cherry Hayes, tearing across Graceland in her petticoats.”

  “But what is she . . .”

  “It never pays to ask, Clarice. Better get crackin’—I think that ceremony is about to start up in the chapel.”

  Evelyn, Peggy Sue, and Peaches were already busily tackling the table settings. Ben was cooking at a frantic pace. “Ben, honey, where is Oliver? He needs to be helping you out.”

  Ben shrugged, his back to her as he worked. “Mother, I don’t really know. He was here just a little while ago, although he looked really sick. Said he had to go take care of something real quick. You mind finding him for me? I could use the extra hands.”

  Lulu was on her way out to find Oliver when she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see Derrick behind her. “What should I be doing, Granny Lulu?”

  Lulu looked around. “Where’s Peaches?”

  Derrick shrugged. “She’s helping out the Graces with the tables. But that stuff looks like it’s all under control.”

  Lulu thought about it. “Either help your Uncle Ben out in the kitchen or maybe help Big Ben, Morty, and Buddy set up the electrical system and speakers? Just hop in.” She saw that Derrick wasn’t completely comfortable with either of those assignments. “Or you could ask Ben what to do if you’re not sure how to prepare the food, you know. Just ask him.”

  “I hate to interrupt him when he’s tearing around trying to throw this stuff together,” said Derrick in a low voice.

  “Or hunt me down and ask me, sweetie, if you have any questions about cooking the food. I can give you whatever directions you need. Just find me,” said Lulu. “And now I’m sorry, Derrick, but I’ve got to run, hon.” She absently patted him on the arm and jogged off to find Oliver.

  It didn’t take her long to find him. He was outside the car museum around a corner, talking very quietly to Holden Parsons.

  “Holden! Honey, you need to run over to the chapel—they’re getting ready to start the ceremony!”

  Holden looked startled. He opened his mouth to say something, but whatever he was trying to say came out in an odd squeaking whisper. He started running toward the street to cross over to the wedding chapel.

  “I don’t believe it!” said Lulu, gaping at the road. “Look! There’s some guests that are parking right there on the side of the road in Elvis’s yard. Well, the fence is there, but nobody is supposed to be parking right there on Elvis Presley Boulevard. I hope somebody gets them to move their cars before the cops get here.” She looked at Oliver, who seemed like he was a million miles away. “Aren’t you feeling well, hon? I hate to say it, but you really need to be over there giving Ben a hand. He’s got all this extra food to fix now, since all those guests showed up.” She peered closer at Oliver.

  “There’s just something eating me up right now, Lulu. All I keep thinking about is how I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t. I’d die in there—there’s no way I could survive in that place.”

  Lulu thought about what Tudy had said about how devastated Oliver had been at the failure of his restaurant. And what Derrick had told her about how Oliver had been furious about Adam and bashed him on the Internet. And what Big Jack had said about Oliver pushing Adam down the stairs in the parking deck. And that he’d argued with Ginger the day she died. Lulu gave a shiver even though the day was hot. No one could see her right here, around the corner of the museum.

  But it still just didn’t seem to fit. “Oliver, what are you talking about? I don’t think you killed Adam. I know you were furious with him, but from what I understand, he got up and walked away after you pushed him.”

  Oliver looked startled. “How did you know about that?”

  “Big Jack told me. He only told me because he knew I could keep a secret. You were kind of worrying me a second ago, getting so serious. But I’m right, aren’t I? You were so scared and horrified at the thought that you’d killed Adam that you weren’t about to try to kill him again. Besides, you already thought he was dead.”

  Oliver hung his head. “Big Jack told me not to tell a soul about it. I guess because I involved him in it when I thought I’d murdered Adam. I was horrified. But who knows—I might have tried to kill him again if I’d known he was still alive. Especially since he would have told the police what I’d done and I’d have been arrested for assault.”

  “And Ginger? You were talking to her that day that Jeanne saw you, weren’t you? I’m guessing you didn’t want to admit it because she was blackmailing you—Pink told me that Ginger and Adam had a little blackmailing business going and Ginger must have inherited it when Adam died.”

  “She was trying to blackmail me,” said Oliver, looking blankly across at the wall.

  “What I don’t understand is what Ginger knew. Did Adam have something on you before he died? But I thought you didn’t even know who he really was.”

  “I didn’t. No, Ginger thought up her very own angle this time—Adam had talked to her on the phone right after he pulled himself off the bottom of the staircase. So she thought the police might want to know that I’d already tried to kill Adam once that day.”

  Lulu said, “And you didn’t take the bait?”

  “No. I was tired of the whole thing by then. I figured that even if I started paying her to keep quiet that somehow the police might figure out what had happened. They’d already found the stuff I’d written online and figured out that I fit the description of the guy having the argument with Adam in the restaurant. And I didn’t kill Adam. It didn’t really matter if Ginger said anything or
not.”

  Lulu glanced at her watch and winced. But she still needed to know. “Did you kill Ginger? Did you decide to just shut her up permanently so you wouldn’t have to keep paying her?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Oliver, where were you the afternoon Ginger was killed?” Oliver opened his mouth up quickly, and Lulu held up her hand to stop him. “And I know it wasn’t at the dentist office because Tudy told me y’all had to pay a missed-appointment fee. And—where was Tudy? She said she was at home, upset about you, but Evelyn saw her driving around that afternoon.”

  Oliver swallowed hard. “No, I wasn’t at the doctor. I forgot all about that appointment after Ginger and I had that argument. I just went out to the park and hung out there for a while, thinking about the mess I was in.”

  “Well, honey, you don’t even know the half of the mess you’re in. Tudy thinks you were cheating on her with Ginger. She was with Jeanne that afternoon and saw you with Ginger. And she knew you were sneaking around and hiding things from her, but she didn’t know what. She thought you were being sneaky because you were having an affair.”

  Oliver rubbed his very large forehead like it was hurting him badly.

  Lulu asked quietly, “Do you think Tudy had anything to do with Ginger’s death? She was awfully mad at the thought Ginger had stolen you away from her.”

  Oliver shook his head. “Lulu! You know Tudy wouldn’t do something like that. She was probably just driving around that afternoon looking for me. That’s all.” But his eyes didn’t look as convinced as his voice.

  “Look, Lulu,” he said, “it’s been good talking to you, but I’ve got to help Ben out with that food.”

  Lulu still wondered what Holden had been talking to Oliver about so intently. But Oliver was already dashing inside the car museum to help Ben. She couldn’t see him killing Adam—not after thinking he was already dead before. But Ginger? He’d sure looked upset at the idea of going to prison . . . and getting rid of Ginger would be a little bit of insurance that the police wouldn’t find out about his fight with Adam.