“Yes.” Her face was bathed in candlelight and womanly vulnerability. “And I … persuaded my fellows that the request was justified, in the light of the abrupt departure of Lois Brown and her husband.
“I also broke the rule that precludes any cookery other than participation in this meal, when I made toast and herb tea for my wife this afternoon.”
“What is this?” Jeffries scooted forward. “You joined the Reverend Enoch’s church? We told you to feed her”—fingers rapping on my head—“whatever her little heart desired. Ain’t we humans first, Mangés second?”
Ben cleared his throat. “I’m respectfully submitting that you have treated me with great sensitivity, which makes my lapse the graver. This afternoon I let slip, to my wife, that deviled kidney came under discussion during this morning’s session.”
Valicia X gasped.
I remembered …
Jeffries opened her mouth, but thought better of wasting time on a scream. Instead, she assisted Pepys as he tottered into a chair, muttering, “God save us from honest fools.”
The faces around the table blurred into one, except for the one that counted. Valicia X managed a valiant smile as she lifted her wine glass. “Congratulations, Miss Rumpson! In the Mangé scheme of things, what’s a failed pie?”
We adjourned to the Red Room. All that sweltering crimson and stifling maroon! All those doilies. And people, people everywhere and not a drop of conversation. Only way to ensure not saying the wrong thing. Awkward, exhausting, but bearable if only I could get to Ben. We had left the dining room separately, without exchanging a word, like undercover agents waiting for the rendezvous. He was trapped on one side of the room and I the other, until a gap opened up between Bingo and an overstuffed chair and I slipped past him and Ernestine talking to Jeffries and with only a couple of yards of carpet to go I had to fight the urge to rush into his arms.
I was breathless when I reached him. “You were wonderful.” I gazed up into his eyes.
He pressed a finger to his lips, but only a potted palm was within listening distance.
“You needn’t have turned yourself in.” Clinging to his hand, the ache in my back, the crick in my neck, the fact that I hadn’t started packing for our departure tomorrow—none of that mattered. “You let your dream of becoming a Mangé go, because you knew Marjorie needed it more than you did.”
He looked away from me, fingers on his tie.
“Well, she doesn’t get to be a father.”
“You did a shining thing.”
He grinned. “Aw shucks, Miss Ellie!”
I wanted to lead him from that room and up the stairs to our boudoir with the silver lurex wallpaper. I wanted to tell him about the baby moving and what I had written to Theola Faith. I wanted to unpeel his tie and unbutton his shirt, and bestow upon him the shiny medal of my love. But that would look like running away. A particularly bad idea when it was the truth. I did feel trapped by the silence, by whatever was outside.
“What’s going on?”
Ben edged us toward the others who were pressed close to the window. Kneeling on the seat, Bingo provided some running commentary; Pepys and Jeffries yanked on the curtains as if ready to shin up them at any moment.
“I don’t know!” I said. But there had come a sickening thud of memory. Those flickers of amber light and the people-sized shadows I’d seen from the dining room … The patch of island we could see through the parted drapery was thick as a jungle with men and women holding lanterns. The Mud Creek armada. Their faces shone pale as moons in the drizzling rain and as we pressed close to the window they began to chant. Some of the words they hurled were lost to the wind, but others made their mark, hitting the window, stinging our ears.
“Hippies!”
“Yuppies!”
“How can we be both?” Marjorie fumed.
Pepys made a gargling sound. “Don’t know about that. Jeffries is a hip. I’m a yup.”
Ernestine was trying to drag Bingo off the window seat when the next epithet caught us all between the eyes. “Witches!”
Merciful heavens! I had eschewed Salem, Massachusetts, for this!
Valicia X grabbed hold of Ben’s sleeve, and I didn’t begrudge her the liberty. Miss Rumpson looked ready to leap into Pepys’ arms—or was it the other way round? Never mind. Valicia brought up a very valid point.
“I suppose we should check to see all doors and windows are secured.”
“Right!” We all said it at once, scattered a few inches, then knotted back up again, in a babbling attempt at keeping from rushing to the same exit, leaving the rest offering free admittance to the enemy.
“I’ll take the front door!” Ben was halfway across the hall. But too late, too late! A shuddering crash of wood flung against wall and hundreds of booted, spurred feet pounding the flagstones. The clank of armour, the swipe of swords. All right, so this wasn’t Cromwell’s army invading Mendenhall! But the imagination has a way of providing sound effects.
The Red Room door banged inward. A hand thrust Ben into a table. It toppled sideways and he was sitting on what now amounted to a foot stool. The mob swarmed forward; the room threatened to split at the seams. At first it had only one face, but then it began to divide up like pieces of cake and I saw people I recognized, Nelga from the dress shop, Barbara and Great Grandma from the Scissor Cut, the lovely Swedish twins, and several people from the bowling banquet—the unspeakably handsome youth, the man in the plaid shirt. None of this was good for a woman in my condition. I’d spotted Laverne and there was the ogress—Jimmy from the bar. But it was the face of the mob leader that struck the most unwelcome chill. The Diethelogian minister. The Reverend Enoch. The room grew dark with the press of humanity.
“Why this is neighbourly!” Valicia’s voice floated above the sea of heads. My hope was that if I couldn’t see her, no one else could. The reverend, to name one, was quite likely to take her beauty as a personal attack on his religious convictions.
“Silence, woman!” Yes, that was him.
“Now, just one moment!” That was Ben.
“We want the witch!” a thin voice piped up.
A deeper one told it to “Hush up!”
“Mud Creek has never been a town without sin!” ranted the reverend, “but, praise His name, there were no Mangé mumble. But with your coming, evil has spread its wings and unleased its talons. We have in our midst a young wife who fell from the ways of righteousness by taking up the life of a beauty operator. Do we pray that she be smote down?” Rhetorical pause. “All in the Lord’s good time. It is not His plan that her husband succumb to the wiles of a Jezebel at The Mud Creek Savings and Loan. Such evil has come fast on the heels of the invasion of this cursed house. My own wife has fled the sanctity of our matrimonial bed. We have witnessed the decadent revelry of a bowling banquet, at which a female member of this foul society put in an appearance and when spoken to, responded in an alien tongue. We hear tell of a witch who casts love spells—”
A squeak from somewhere in the room. That could only be Marjorie Rumpson.
“And what is the culmination of all this?” The reverend’s voice rose to a shuddering swell, like organ music. “Murderrr!”
“Shut your fat face!” There was a thwacking sound, as if someone had hit the reverend over the head with a handbag. The new voice went on. “Who damn well asked you to lead the posse? I near as hell knocked you overboard when you climbed in the boat, but naw, when it came to it, I wasn’t ’bout to give you the chance to try and walk on water.”
Someone shouted: “Get on with it, Jimmy!”
The Ogress from the bar … the woman who had lent Theola Faith the flat. “Give me a minute to work up some spit,” Jimmy growled. “And someone get Enoch out of here before Laverne comes apart.”
I could make out Jimmy’s profile as she worked her way to the front of the mob. “Lookee here, you Mangé slobs, what you sees is the Mud Creek Moms along of some token fellers. Before we kicked our boats into t
he water, me and the gang mosied on down to Sheriff Tom’s home away from home and set Theola Faith loose. Would a woman, who grew up here—played ball and swapped valentine cards with some of us—murder her own daughter? Like hell we’ll believe she’s guilty when there’s the likes of you people just crying out to be suspects.…”
“All righty, hold it right there!” The voice blasted the room, scattering the lynching party like a bunch … of pigeons shot to feathers. Instant pathway to the door, where stood Sheriff Tom Dougherty, his gun looking everyone straight in the eye. “Guess I didn’t rate an invitation to the party!”
“Sometimes,” Laverne stepped bravely forward, “we have to remind ourselves as how the law is a good servant, but a poor master.”
A thin man with spectacles zapped a pencil from behind his ear, a notepad from his pocket and said, “Ron Horbett, The Biweekly Byword. May I quote you, ma’am?”
“Quote me,” responded Sheriff Tom dolefully. “I’m arresting anyone who doesn’t back up, sit down and shut up. I’ve brought someone along with me who’d appreciate a word with you all.”
“Who?” The word got squashed along with arms, legs and noses as people attempted to comply with the sheriff’s orders. Perhaps they were only playing for time, but suddenly the room had become a sit-in. Our Mangé group took over a section of hearthrug as though it were an embassy. Ben’s arm had just slipped around me when Sheriff Tom stepped to one side and she came through the door.
Mary Faith! Looking for all the world like a secretary arriving to take dictation. Brown hair, brown linen suit, the wing-tipped glasses set squarely on her nose. This was no ghost risen from a watery grave.
“Hoax!” The word went up in a roar.
“My God,” Ben whispered, “she set the whole thing up, contrived her own death to incriminate her mother. Will authors stop at nothing to sell books?”
“Hello, my darlings!” She gave a devilish smile, but her voice … It didn’t fit Mary, any more … than her hair, which she was peeling off to reveal … a shiny platinum bob underneath. Now it was away with the glasses, off with the brown jacket, the skirt unsnapped and tossed aside. A repeat performance of her strip tease at Jimmy’s Bar.
Theola Faith.
And suddenly I knew.
Sheriff Tom pushed a stool toward her and gracefully, seductively, she perched on it as though this were a night club and she was beginning her act. “Darlings, I know you must all think me dreadfully wicked and I do wish I could honestly say I am riddled with remorse, but I’m not. What greater challenge to an actress than to create a character that people—publishers, media, fans—all believed to be real. Two characters really, because there is no Theola Faith—Mother. Never wanted to be one the way so many women do, but the strange thing was …” She looked directly at me. “… I grew fond of her … Mary and I found that murdering the only child I never had was much more difficult than I had thought.”
“Why did you do it—make her up, write the book …” Nelga from the dress shop stammered.
Drawing her feet up on the rung of the stool, Theola Faith smiled at her. “Money was the original inducement. Darlings, I did think about simply writing my memoirs. But I quickly saw I had to be kidding. This will shock most of you, but much of the time I have led a deadly dull life. I have never never tried to save a species of wild animal from extinction or tried to stop a war single handed. Oh, I’ve had my share of love affairs. I’ve been rude to people at dinner parties. But you think people are going to pay twenty-one ninety-five for that? Sure I realized that one excellent possibility … would be to write about all my dearest friends and strip them naked in public. But, sweeties, that wasn’t my literary style. Oh, the burning resentment every time I went into a book store and saw yet another bestseller by someone whose only credential was the mother or father she—or he—was feeding into a manure mixer. I was being denied infamy because I was childless … And then it hit me how many of these books were ghost written—”
The Reverend Enoch beat his breast. “Lord, this woman has committed the deadly sin of fraud!”
“So,” Theola Faith said serenely, “does everyone who writes fiction.”
Sheriff Dougherty shook his head. “Beats me how you thought you could get away with it.”
“Darling,” she tucked a sweep of platinum hair behind her ear, “living on the edge made a pleasant change after being retired from the world with only my house plants to care desperately whether I got up in the morning. The most minimal check would have revealed that Mary sprang full grown, but I counted on the public’s insatiable desire for the truth, to blind them to the truth.”
“Did you plan for to get rid of her right from the start?” That was great-grandma from the Scissor Cut.
“Mary, Mary quite pathetic had to die. She was a part I played in a script I wrote. Every play has its conclusion but what a challenge the last act! I saw myself in the witness box, wearing a marvelous hat—so few parts call for hats these days. Motherhood On Trial. If I got off, no one need know the truth. If things went awry, I would come clean and write my memoirs while doing time for perjury! Such fun planning the murder. As there could be no body, I had to stage her death—in full view of an audience. I always knew this house would be perfect for my purpose. I could have asked my few cronies from the old days, and my former maid Begita for help. They had been such sweets already—begging to be allowed in the book. Graza Lambino graciously offered to put all her deceased husbands at my disposal. But one doesn’t like to impose. So when Pepys and Jeffries asked if I would agree to Mendenhall being put at the disposal of their cookery club for a weekend, I was delighted to oblige. Very selfish of me to involve them.” The panda bear eyes turned wistful as a child’s. “I see that now …”
Pepys opened his mouth, but Jeffries tapped him on the head and it snapped shut. “Him and me, never did nothing to betray our Mangé oath; we knew you didn’t want no one here blamed.” Her eyes forced me to lower mine.
“So tell us, Theola, how did you manage the murder?” came Nelga’s neutral voice.
Miss Faith shifted on her stool. “I was delighted when I heard there would be a Fourth of July barbecue. I would have my audience. And everything went without a hitch. My one hangnail was the weather, but the storm held off and in the end proved an ally. I returned from Mud Creek in the boat with Pepys. I made my appearance as Mary when the barbecue was about to begin and announced that once and for all I was going to have it out with my mother. Once on the boat, I went up to the flying bridge, cut the wires to the engine compartment fan exhaust, attached the engine ignition with insulated wires to the hands of the alarm clock which was set to go off in five minutes, and poured gasoline into the engine compartment. This lady’s a river rat, remember? I got off the boat—”
“Where did you hide?” Valicia X asked.
“In the boat house, under a prop garden seat used in Melancholy Mansion. Then when everyone had returned to the house, I slipped in and hid out in the cellar. If anyone had come down, I would have gotten into the coffin. But no one did. And when I thought the coast was clear in the early A.M. I left the house …”
“Dressed as the ghost of the Woman In The Portrait?” Bingo panted. “I saw you twice—”
“The first time—the night you Mangés arrived—was for practice and fun.” Theola Faith smiled sadly at him. “I knew Laverne would buy me time on the fatal night, until my return to Mud Creek. She told Tom I wasn’t to be woken until morning when he came knocking with the bad news and he,” she tossed the sheriff a smile stiff with bravado, “as I counted upon, he was too much the gentleman to insist.”
“How did you get back across?” someone demanded.
“In one of the inflatable orange boats Irv sells at the gas Station. I noticed one in the boat house when I was casing it out, but that one disappeared, so I bought my own.”
Silence.
“Well?” Theola Faith prodded, “what happens now? Do I get green stamps for not
letting the Mangés burn for my murder?”
Voices climbing over and under each other, heads nodding, chins wagging. Everyone looked at Sheriff Tom as though he were Moses and could lead the way out of the desert.
Sliding his gun back into its holster, he said slowly, “Theola, you always were a gal for exaggerating. Likely one of those big city cops would see things different, but here in Mud Creek never has been a crime for a taxpayer to blow up her own boat. And no one here can say they saw Mary go aboard. Because there was no Mary. Seems to me, if we could all agree to keep our mouths shut …”
“The secret’s safe.” I smiled across at Ben. “This town protects its own and the Mangé Code produces men and women trained to keep mum.” What’s the harm if Monster Mommy continues to sell millions of copies, year after year?
“But if you would like us to take an oath,” suggested Bingo, “we will slice out our tongues for luncheon meat, if we should ever reveal to a living soul …”
Theola Faith winked at me.
The dream picked up where it had left off. I was in the hall at Merlin’s Court, searching for Child Ellie who had rudely bunked off as soon as I tried to tell her I was going to have a baby. The fox heads grinned from the walls and the twin suits of armour exchanged nervous glances when I brushed aside a giant cobweb and started up the stairs.
“Ellie!” Her voice crept up behind me, like a touch on the shoulder.
“Mother! What are you doing here?”
“Why, darling! I thought you would be pleased to see me.” Hand on the banister post, she did a couple of knee bends. Sinking down on the bottom step in a swirl of gauzy grey she patted for me to join her. “I do confess to a certain curiosity about the Theola Faith affair.”
“She remembered you,” I said.
“But, naturally!” Mother turned her water nymph face away from me. “That segment in Monster Mommy about Mary visiting Aunt Guinevere was a remake of your first visit here.”
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