by D R Lowrey
She had been followed by Esmerelda, Abuelita’s long-lost daughter who had recently returned. Essie had come back to Mama, but not quite the same as when she’d left. Forty years will do that. In a fit of teenage rage, Essie had run away to California with a boyfriend in hopes of joining a hippie commune. Arriving on the scene well after the highwater mark for hippie communes, the only receptive association turned out to be not just a commune, but also a coven. While Essie had never fully adapted to the occult lifestyle, certain aspects continued to cast their spell to this day. Looking down upon the body in her tie-dyed muumuu, she had danced a little jig, uttered an incantation, and then collapsed in a heap. After a dramatic pause, she’d popped back up, rotated her extended arms in broad circles, and hissed like a punctured inner-tube. She’d ended the exercise by pointing at the cadaver’s head—or maybe at the toad—while reciting a limerick not featuring a man from Nantucket. After completing the verse, she had held this pointing position for a good three minutes, perhaps waiting to be handed a broom.
None of the ladies had ever seen the man before, not even in a dream or a hallucination.
That had all been earlier this morning. Now, the ladies were inside, waiting for Nigel. He’d have liked to keep them waiting, but he felt an obligation to minimize the dawdling since it was his first day on the job. He had already come to understand the ladies largely kept to themselves in separate parts of the house, yet he found all four members assembled in the salon.
“Hello, ladies,” said Nigel to the silent horde. “Busy morning.”
If silent glaring was a form of busyness, then it was still an action-packed day for the ladies. Nigel had the feeling of a fly caught in a web shared by four black widow spiders.
“Can I get you something?” he said.
Mrs. Sandoval replied, “Mr. Nigel, something has come up.”
“I should say so,” said Nigel. “Or gone down, might be the better term. It’s not every day a dead body turns up on the premises, is it?”
The ladies looked at the floor and grumbled.
The lack of response unsettled Nigel.
“I was speaking rhetorically, of course, but just for grins, let me repeat the question. It isn’t everyday a dead body turns up on the premises”—he awaited their reassurances—“is it?”
“Of course not, Mr. Nigel. That’s not the issue we wish to address,” said Mrs. Sandoval.
“No, of course not. I can tell that weightier matters are afoot,” said Nigel.
“Weightier, perhaps not, but they are of great importance to us,” said the oddly levelheaded Stefanie.
The ladies wore tight lips; they averted their glances. It was coming on to Thanksgiving, and Nigel imagined himself covered in feathers and peering out of a pen at Farmer Bill sharpening his implements.
“I think I’m catching the gist of this,” said Nigel. “It was a quick hire. I understand that. If you’ve changed your minds, you’ve changed your minds. We can all be big about this and agree that it just didn’t work out. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say. Of course, there was that rather intense and costly butlering course, but I did learn how to tie an ascot and that, at least, is something to build on—”
“No, Mr. Nigel, we’re not firing you,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “Not yet, anyway.”
Taking a moment to consider her reply, Nigel wasn’t sure how he felt about this. He hadn’t planned on being fired his first day, but if this dead body business happened even, say, semi-annually, he wasn’t sure he’d found his dream job. “Are you sure?” he said. “Sometimes it’s good to go with your gut.”
“No, Mr. Nigel. We need your help now more than ever.”
“Really? You’ve never had my help before. You might not realize what you’re getting into.”
Mrs. Sandoval started to speak before clamping her mouth shut. She looked to the other three ladies. She received three blank looks in return. “You see, there’s going to be a wedding.”
“A wedding? How wonderful. Congratulations. It’s a very lucky man to win your hand, Mrs. Sandoval. May I be the first—”
“It’s not me, Mr. Nigel.”
“Not you? Well, your lovely daughter Stefanie is already off the market, am I right?”
“Yes, you are,” said Stefanie.
“In that case, it must be the, um…unique…the one and only, Esmerelda. Congratulations. I’m sure you and your spouse will be so…unique together. Let me be the—” Nigel saw Esmerelda shaking her head. “Not Esmerelda?” He peered furtively in the direction of the vulturess, Abuelita. She had been engaged just three months before. That marriage had been put on hold after the groom’s honeymoon plans were revealed to include bride-icide. “You don’t mean—surely not…not Abuelita,” said Nigel.
“What do you mean, not Abuelita?” said Abuelita, reaching into her pocket for a projectile.
“It’s Abuelita?” said Nigel, preparing to leap behind the sofa.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “Abuelita is to be married.”
Nigel extended a very tentative paw. “May I be the—”
“Stay away!” shouted Abuelita. “I’m remaining chaste for my honeymoon. No lookee, no touchee.”
With hands safely tucked behind his back, Nigel bowed. “I’m sorry, Abuelita. I merely wanted to congratulate you on this wonderful development. Someone will be very happy.” Though it’s hard to imagine who.
“It sure as hell won’t be you, if you keep ogling me. Any monkey business and you’ll be laid out in the garden with one toad down your gullet and one up your—”
“Abuelita, please,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “Mr. Nigel is our new butler. He’s here to help.”
“Any way I can, madam,” said Nigel, brushing wrinkles from his pants after standing up from behind the sofa.
“That’s the spirit, Mr. Nigel,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “You’re in charge of the wedding arrangements.”
“Me? In charge of the wedding arrangements? While I’d love to see Abuelita have an absolutely smashing wedding, do you think I’m the best person for such a task? I’ve never planned a wedding.”
“Come now, Mr. Nigel,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “How hard can it be? You are a butler, after all. You’ve been to some kind of school. Why, just this morning you disposed of a dead body, and I’m sure your funeral arrangements will be to die for—”
“My funeral arrangements?”
After a moment of apparent confusion, Mrs. Sandoval smiled. “I’m sorry. I must have startled you. I don’t mean your funeral, silly. I mean for that dead person.”
“But we don’t know who he is. Why would we arrange for the funeral?”
“Well, Mr. Nigel, if someone else speaks up and wishes to do the honors, I suppose we acquiesce, but he did choose our property to die on. I feel we owe him a proper burial. We can put him in the garden.”
Stefanie and Esmerelda puckered their faces as if the idea of a man underneath the ornamentals didn’t sit well. Then they looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
“Bury him in the garden?” repeated Nigel.
“Play it as it lays,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “It’s fitting, seeing as how we occupy a former golf course. Maybe that can be the theme for the funeral, The Final Hole.”
“No!” shouted Abuelita. “We’re not burying him in the garden. You do that and the Laura Bush petunias will get trampled. Ain’t worth it.”
“I agree,” said Nigel. “Think of the petunias.”
Mrs. Sandoval apparently had not thought of the petunias. “Maybe you’re right. The most convenient place, for the mourners’ sake, would be close to the parking lot.”
“Enough with the funeral, already,” spouted Abuelita. “That stiff’s on ice. He’ll keep for months, if need be. What about my wedding?”
“What is the date for this blessed event?” asked Nigel, thinking that Halloween had just passed. “After the holidays, I take it.”
“The fourteenth. November the fourteenth, a Saturday
,” replied Mrs. Sandoval.
“The fourteenth of November? But today’s the ninth,” squealed Nigel.
“No shit, Sherlock. You better get that ass in gear,” said Abuelita.
“I don’t know where to start,” said Nigel, placing a hand to his forehead to control a series of mad twitches infecting his left and right eyebrows.
“Let’s start with the wedding gown. I can help you with that,” said Stefanie. “We’ll find a nice lace gown in cream.”
“Cream? No, ma’am,” said Abuelita. “Not cream. Not for my wedding.”
“Cream or off-white is traditional for older brides marrying for a second time,” said Stefanie. “Maybe you were thinking white, but that’s a symbol of innocence and purity that—”
“Crimson,” yelled Abuelita.
“What?” said Stefanie.
“Crimson. Crimson and gold. Those are my wedding dress colors, and I don’t want an argument. Ain’t nobody can say I didn’t earn those colors. And I want to show off my boobs. Lots of boobs. They been wrapped up like lunchbox burritos for decades now. They need one last coming-out party.”
“It’s your day, I guess,” said Stefanie.
“I’ll make some lotions and potions,” chimed Esmerelda, framing her face with dancing hands.
“I feel ill,” mumbled Nigel. The quiver infecting his eyebrows had meandered south, settling in for a lengthy stay among his digestive organs.
“It’s too late to send out invitations,” said Mrs. Sandoval. “But we’ll need a registry. What is your fiancé’s name?”
Abuelita stroked her chin.
“You do know his name, don’t you Abuelita?” said Stefanie.
“Of course I know his name. It just escapes me at the moment. I don’t call him by his name, anyway.”
“What do you call him?”
“By his Twitter handle, at JakWad44. Of course, I have my own pet name for him.”
“And that would be?” prompted Stefanie.
“That’s for me to know and you to shut up about.”
The grandfather clock in the atrium donged.
Nigel had heard of death knells, and now he’d felt one.
Mrs. Sandoval threw up a finger for each dong. When the number of thrown up fingers reached twelve, she shouted, “Tequila!”
Nigel’s rush hour had arrived.
CHAPTER THREE
A Feral Butler’s Day Off
Nigel awoke to his teeth clattering and his stomach fluttering. His trembling hands grabbed for the bedsheets, and he clenched his jaws, tightening his muscles to choke off the shudder. Once he’d stopped shaking, the bed stopped moving. All was quiet except for the sound of his shallow breathing and a rumble in his stomach, which he suspected was his soul curling up to die.
His beauty sleep had left him exhausted in his bed. Throughout the night, revolving thoughts of weddings, funerals, snide detectives, and stepping on a dead man’s hand feasted on his mind like ravenous bedbugs. Thank God for nightmares so vivid that they wake you up.
Nigel would have been squeezing Annie for support had she been there, but she was an early riser. Especially, it seemed, on mornings when Nigel was being sucked into a bottomless maelstrom.
Sitting up in bed and waiting for the sweat to dry, Nigel thought of the previous day’s events. This was the last thing he wanted to think about, but sometimes the last thing you want to think about is the only thing you can think about until you’ve thought about it. So, he thought about it.
Being new to the butler’s profession, he’d had his share of first-day jitters. Worrying, for instance, that he might be tasked with folding a fitted sheet, ironing triple-pleated trousers, or excoriating a scullery maid. Outside of those butler’s banes, however, he’d approached the day with a reasonable degree of confidence. Unfortunately, disposing of dead bodies had failed to show up on Old Winpole’s syllabus. The planning of weddings and funerals had also been neglected. Nigel had the sneaking suspicion that even if he’d signed up for the Butler’s Deluxe course at twice the price, such topics would have scarcely been mentioned. He had hoped that for his first trip to the plate, he would have been lobbed a few ripe melons, underhand. Not, as it turned out, slung an assortment of scorching meteorites.
To make matters worse, he had competition of the kind that one cannot defeat. Gastrick, the previous butler, had set an impossibly high standard of service. Something Nigel had been reminded of on an hourly basis. Absent from these comments had been any mention of Gastrick, superlative butler though he was, as the central participant in a plot to murder Abuelita. Had old Gastrick’s murdering skills matched his buttling expertise, Abuelita would by now be food for mushrooms, while Gastrick would be overseeing the estate’s conversion to a country club with eighteen holes of golf.
Recent history notwithstanding, phrases beginning with “Gastrick used to,” “Gastrick would,” and “Gastrick would never,” had became so annoyingly thick that Nigel, at the end of his first workday, had assembled the estate’s occupants to reintroduce himself.
“I am Nigel,” he had said. “Your new butler. I endeavor to provide you with the most outstanding service possible. Rest assured, I am fully cognizant that, as your new butler, my services may be somewhat at variance with recent conventions. Be that as it may, I wish to emphasize that two services I will never provide are: one, murdering you in your sleep; and two, altering your wills behind your backs. Thank you for your attention.” Raising the tip of his nose, the right brow, and the left upper lip, he had turned and left for the day.
Being a butler had some positives. But that was yesterday. As bad as the night had been, and as bad as the day leading up to the night had been, today would be better. Sure it would. It was Tuesday, his day off. The unusual schedule of Tuesdays off and half-days Saturday and Sunday had been instituted by his predecessor, Gastrick, of course. The wife’s dreaded to-do list of home improvements awaited, as always, but before he’d looked, the phone rang. Nigel fished his phone out of yesterday’s pants and saw that Annie was calling, probably to add three new items.
“Listen, I know it’s your day off, and you want to get to that to-do list,” said Annie. She was smart but no mind reader. “But there’s been an emergency. Mother needs your help with her hot water heater. It’s sprung a leak. The water’s draining okay, but she’ll need a new one.”
“Today?”
“Of course, today. She can’t take a shower without hot water, and you wouldn’t want to be around Mother if she can’t take a shower.”
“I wouldn’t want to be around Mother—”
“Stop. Don’t say it. Not now. Stanley would have taken care of this kind of thing, but now that he’s gone, things like this just put Mother in a tailspin. You know she still blames you.”
“For her hot water heater?”
“For Stanley walking out. So, consider this a chance to redeem yourself.”
“Stanley left by his own good judgment,” said Nigel. “I had nothing to do it.”
“Maybe, but that’s not what she thinks.”
“Can’t she call a plumber? That’s what I’d do.”
“She can’t be alone in her house with a plumber. Just go over there and do what you need to do to fix it. In case you’ve forgotten, replacing the hot water heater is also on your list. You fix hers, score a few brownie points, and get some practice all at once.”
“Okay. But it’s not your mother I’ll be collecting my brownie rewards from.”
Frankly, Nigel found the image of Annie’s mother in a tailspin not that unappealing. Certainly not something needing immediate attention. The idea that he was “to blame” for Stanley’s escape was ludicrous. Nigel took no credit. On the other hand, if Stanley felt he’d been instrumental, a kind mention in his last will and testament would not be rebuked. As for being “redeemed” in Mother’s eyes, she’d treated Nigel like something to be scraped off a shoe for as long as he could remember. He hadn’t seen a change of heart over the ten
years of his marriage no matter what he did.
Having established who wore the jeans in the family, Nigel slipped on his bloomers and consulted the YouTube experts on hot water heater installations. Nothing presented seemed insurmountable for this recent graduate from butler college. After all, he’d installed a shower head, and it barely leaked at all. The biggest challenge would be getting the bulky tank into the attic, but thankfully, his mother-in-law was the strapping, athletic type.
Before stopping at the hardware store for parts, he made a side trip to Stanley’s Pies and Desserts. The proprietor of this shop was none other than his mother-in-law’s estranged husband, Stanley.
Stanley had left the old battle dragon a few months earlier, being declared middle-aged crazy by baffled friends. Nigel was baffled by their bafflement. Middle-aged reasonable, it seemed to him. The astounding bit wasn’t his leaving, but what happened directly after. Stanley had become the current boy-toy for a local celebrity, Cam Logan. For those who knew Stanley and Cam Logan, nothing about that last sentence could ever sound right. As a pair, they were like Dom Perignon champagne with a tray of biscuits ’n gravy served with a plastic spork. I mean, when a faded, roly-poly, dough-faced, retired pipefitter shacks up with a rich, glamorous, multi-husbanded country music star, people say, “Whaaa?” and rightly so.
As if that were not enough, the relationship had stirred in Stanley a latent artistic soul no one would have ever suspected. His newfound creativity spewed forth in the form of baked goods. With Ms. Logan’s backing, he’d opened an artisanal bakeshop, becoming the hottest entrepreneur in the county.
