The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue

by Regina Hale Sutherland

  “What are you doing in there?” Henri called.

  I jerked back from my reflection. “Nothing.”

  “Well then hurry and come back to bed.” His voice promised another round of sensual pleasure. And, strangely, where I should have been excited at the prospect, a vague sense of disappointment lodged in my stomach. Why? After months of depression in the wake of Jim’s departure, things were finally going my way. I should be on top of the world. So why did I feel so sad?

  I hadn’t been naïve about where my relationship with Henri was headed. I’d packed a small tote bag with morning-after essentials and stashed them in the cupboard underneath the sink the night before. Quickly, I brushed my teeth and ran a wide-toothed comb through my hair, leaving it tousled but tangle-free. Undereye concealer or other tricks of the trade would have to wait. I hitched the sheet up a little higher over my breasts and returned to the bedroom.

  Henri was leaning against the mound of pillows he’d piled against the headboard. He smiled lazily and patted the mattress next to him. “Come back to bed.”

  And I did. But I brought with me the knowledge that part of me was disappointed it wasn’t Jim looking at me beneath heavy-lidded eyes and welcoming me into his arms with a deep, lingering kiss, the way he would have once upon a time.

  Sometimes, even at a time like this, you couldn’t do anything but miss the boy you’d fallen in love with, even when he failed at being the man you’d thought him to be.

  CHAPTER TEN

  An Unmarked Knave

  I left Henri’s late Saturday morning after fixing a cheese omelet for the two of us and jotting down a list of what he needed done during the next week. If it hadn’t been for the invoices for my work hours that I sent him on a regular basis, I’d have felt almost married to the man, our relationship was so domestic.

  It felt good to be headed back to my house after the emotional highs and lows of the last twenty-four hours, although when I pulled into the driveway I hoped that none of the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue noticed I hadn’t come home last night. I was confused enough about this new development to want to keep it to myself until I’d had a chance to sort it out.

  My life had gotten so busy that there was no shortage of tasks I should have attended to, but I ignored them and instead headed for the backyard with my gardening tools in hand. Grace’s influence was growing more evident in the flower beds that lined the privacy fence where it enclosed the yard. Little by little, I was reclaiming the wilderness.

  I’d been digging up weeds in the back flower bed along the fence for about an hour when I decided that the whole bed really needed turning over. I traipsed over to the ramshackle detached garage to fetch my shovel.

  I had dug pretty deep in the flower bed when the shovel hit something hard. A crack like a popgun nearly sent me straight out of my gardening clogs. With the edge of the shovel, I scraped back the loose dirt to discover the source of the sound.

  Scattered white sticks tumbled this way and that. And then my stomach dropped to my aforementioned clogs when I realized that those little white things weren’t sticks. Or roots. Or anything else you’d expect to find when you dug a hole in your backyard.

  They were fragments of bone.

  Great. I had dug up old Flossie’s dog or cat, the remnants of that first Queen of Hearts’ beloved family pet.

  At least, I thought it was a family pet. Until I scraped away more dirt and saw the very distinct shape of a human tibia, along with a metatarsal or two. A little more scraping revealed some vertebrae. Connected to a human skull.

  Grace said later that my scream took ten years off her life. She called 911, thinking I’d been attacked by one of the transients who sometimes roamed the neighborhood looking for odd jobs. The next thing I knew, two armed Metro patrol officers appeared around the corner of the house, Grace hard on their heels and brandishing a baseball bat.

  “Ma’am? You okay?” the first officer asked. He was young, not much older than my son Connor, and he had the freshly scrubbed look of someone who hadn’t been beaten down by life—at least, not yet. The second officer, older, harder, and more cynical-looking, ducked into the garage in pursuit of my phantom attacker.

  “No. In there,” I said, pointing with a trembling finger toward the hole. The young officer stepped into the flower bed and looked down.

  “Holy crap.”

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “What is it?” Grace asked, coming to peer over my shoulder. “Are you okay, Ellie?” And then she gasped when she, too, saw what was in the hole.

  Officer McFarland, according to the name on his badge, reached for the radio at his belt. “I’d better get crime scene over here.” His dark eyes bore into mine. “Ma’am, do you have any idea who this is?”

  I shook my head, throat too dry to speak.

  Grace peered into the hole again. “What’s that in there with him?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  Officer McFarland stepped up beside me and looked down. “It looks like hair.” He pulled out his billy club, stuck it into the hole, and fished out the object. A matted clump of brown emerged, and when he flipped it over onto the ground, you could see some sort of material or netting underneath.

  “It’s a toupee,” he said.

  “Marvin Etherington,” Grace said in a matter-of-fact tone. “I’d recognize that bad toupee anywhere.”

  “Who?” the officer and I asked simultaneously.

  “Flossie’s husband. Marvin Etherington. He ran off in 1947. At least, that’s what Flossie always said. She had him declared legally dead and collected the insurance money. And he wore the world’s worst toupee.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “How many other missing men with bad toupees would be buried in your flower bed?” Grace’s papery cheek had gone pink beneath its veneer of pancake makeup and face powder. She meant to appear calm, but her high color revealed her distress. I guessed it would have been rather disconcerting to come face-to-face with the bones—and toupee—of a deceased former neighbor.

  Officer McFarland pulled out a small spiral notebook and began jotting things down. “He disappeared in ’47, you say?”

  Grace nodded. “It took a while, but Flossie had him declared dead. Legally dead. She collected enough life insurance money to put the girls through college without having to go back to work.”

  The officer scowled. “Where can I find this Flossie?”

  Grace snorted, some of the tension in her face receding. “Mount Olivet Cemetery. In the family plot.” She winked at me. “If you want to interview her, I’d be happy to go along for the ride.”

  Officer McFarland didn’t appreciate Grace’s flippant reply as much as I did. I also suspected it was her way of dealing with the shock. “That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” he scowled. “If you ladies would just wait in the house, I’ll do my job.”

  “Yes, officer,” I said in my most placating tone, the one I’d cultivated for the days when Jim came home from a fifteen-hour day in surgery. If there was one thing I knew how to handle, it was a fussy man.

  Grace balked at being ordered around by someone fifty years her junior, but before Officer McFarland could take exception to a senior citizen with no respect for his authority, I hustled her away. I wanted to know a lot more about the late Marvin Etherington and how in the world he wound up in my flower bed.

  Within a short time, the crime scene unit rolled up in front of my house. Young Officer McFarland called me outside again to ask me more questions, so it was some time before I could corner Grace and find out more about the first Queen of Hearts. The crime scene people dug a pit the size of Cleveland in my backyard, but eventually they recovered all of Marvin Etherington’s various bits. I know that because I’d done my time in dissection lab while in nursing school at Vanderbilt. On more than one occasion, I’d carried a bunch of bones in an unassuming paisley print bag from the lab to my dorm room for further study. So as I watched the forensic patholog
ist lay out Marvin’s remains on a tarp, I could tell he was all there. And it didn’t take a trained eye to see the hole in the back of his skull. Whoever had done him in must have hit him so hard that, ironically, he’d probably never felt it.

  When I returned to the house, Grace was running the dust mop around the scarred hardwood floor of my dining room. The Queens of Woodlawn Avenue certainly weren’t hesitant to make themselves at home in one another’s houses.

  “Did they find all of him?” Grace asked as she swept the lint and dirt into the dustbin.

  “Everything except the missing part from the back of his head.” I slumped into one of the dining room chairs. “Not much doubt about how he died.”

  Grace pulled out the chair next to me and sat down. “Don’t judge Flossie too harshly. Marvin was a trial to her. Always staying out late, carrying on with other women.”

  “Oh, I’m not judging her,’ I assured Grace, thinking of Jim’s last phone call. I knew too well how Flossie must have felt. “But wouldn’t divorce have been less risky?”

  Grace frowned. “Not back then. Women didn’t have as many rights, or any assurance they’d get custody of the children. Not like you young things today.”

  “Well, I can sympathize with her murderous intent.”

  Grace patted my hand. “You’re lucky. You have choices.”

  I tried to return her smile, but the truth was, I didn’t feel lucky. I felt screwed over. And none of this had been my choice. My husband, my house, my seat in the dining room at the country club now belonged to another woman whose only claim to fame was that her breasts had yet to sag.

  “When the police are done, we’ll have our bridge night,” Grace said.

  “Bridge night? Grace, how on earth am I supposed to play bridge? They’ve just found a murdered man in my back flower bed.”

  She looked genuinely puzzled. “Marvin Etherington’s been dead a long time. And you didn’t kill him. Why should that keep you from going on with your life?”

  I looked at her, mouth agape.

  About that time, Officer McFarland knocked on the front door yet again, and when I answered he politely thanked me for putting up with all the hoopla. “We’ll send someone back to fill up the hole.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I assured him. “I can take care of it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.” And I was.

  Because it had occurred to me during my conversation with Grace that if my life was going to move forward, it might be a good idea to bury some dead bodies of my own in that big hole in the backyard.

  Okay, I wasn’t literally going to bury a body, although the thought of Jim laid out in that hole had a certain appeal. No, I wasn’t going to give Officer McFarland a reason to come back. What I was going to lay to rest were more like symbols. Tokens. Mementos. Things I was done with. Not things my kids would want some day, like our wedding photos or the picture of the whole family made on the cruise ship on our twentieth anniversary a few years ago. I wanted Connor and Courtney to have some happy memories of their parents’ marriage.

  “Why don’t you take a shower and get ready for the bridge game?” Grace said when I’d closed the door on Officer McFarland.

  “I’ll change in a minute. First, I’ve got to do something.”

  I went to my bedroom and took the memory box off my nightstand. I wanted to do this before I lost my nerve. When I came back through the living room, Grace got up from the couch and followed me into the backyard.

  “Ellie? What are you doing?”

  “Burying my husband,” I said. “Just like Flossie did.”

  The shovel was still lying next to the hole, and when I saw the size of the yawning cavern along my back fence, I almost regretted not taking the officer up on his offer of help.

  “Ellie, you can’t fill that whole thing in by yourself.”

  “Yes, I can.” I had no idea if I really could. Ironically, I could have really used Jim’s Bowflexed-honed biceps at a time like this. Without further ado, I dropped the box into the hole. It landed with a satisfying thud.

  “Are you sure about this?” Grace’s words were cautious, but she had a smile on her face. A smile that said she understood the symbolism perfectly.

  “Remind me to thank Flossie in my prayers for the inspiration.”

  We both laughed, and I picked up my shovel and began to scoop dirt into the hole. The thick clods that fell on the box echoed like the ones I’d heard at funerals when the gravediggers started to cover the coffins.

  By the time I had the whole half-filled, I was sweating and blisters had formed on both hands. By the time the hole was completely full, my hair was plastered to my head with sweat and I was starting to smell about as rank as the compost heap at the other end of the flower bed. Grace had left long before since she was hosting the Queens that night and needed to attend to her hostess duties. The only sounds in the backyard were my own labored breathing and the slice and whoosh of the shovel as it conveyed the dirt.

  Finally, I threw down the shovel and sank into a heap on top of the mound of dirt, exhausted. My earlier elation had slipped away under the physical strain of filling the hole, and I just felt spent. But I had done it. I had taken my life with Jim and given it the funeral it deserved.

  Now I just had to conquer the urge to pick up the shovel in my blistered and bloody hands and start digging it back up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Vulnerable

  If someone had told me a month ago that by the end of April I’d have launched my own business, taken a lover, joined the Red Hat Society, been named the chair of a nearly non-existent committee for the Cannon Ball and found a dead body in my backyard, I would have laughed.

  I wasn’t laughing now, though.

  I dragged my aching body to Jane’s house that night with little enthusiasm for red hats or bridge lessons or even for Linda’s delectable lemon tarts. Per usual, though, the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue refused to let me wallow—or even take a breather for that matter.

  Tonight, they intended to teach me how to keep score. I had watched the rest of them scribble down numbers in the “we” and “they” columns, above and below seemingly arbitrary lines, and it was all Greek to me. And I wouldn’t have minded it staying that way.

  The other Queens, though, were determined.

  “To make game, you have to score a hundred points. The first team to win two games takes the rubber.”

  Okay, I could wrap my brain around that much, but things became much foggier when they started talking about bonus points, partscores, and the difference between the numbers above and below the line.

  “Let’s say you make game,” Linda said, writing down 100 below the line. “Then you’re vulnerable.”

  “Vulnerable? What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re halfway there,” Grace said. “But you’re also in more danger.”

  “Why would it be more dangerous to be ahead?”

  “Because the penalties for not making your contract are doubled.”

  “That hardly seems fair. If you’re ahead, you shouldn’t be penalized twice as much for getting set.”

  Jane laughed. “Whoever said bridge was fair? It’s a lot like life. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

  “It’s like raising the stakes in poker,” Grace said. “The more you wager, the more you win.”

  “It still doesn’t seem right.” After all I’d been through in the last month, I was in a frame of mind to be rewarded for the risks I’d taken, not penalized.

  “Look on the bright side.” Linda smiled encouragingly. “If you’re vulnerable and you win the next contract, then you win the rubber.”

  “Just remember not to overbid when you’re vulnerable,” Jane advised. “By the same token, you can be a little more aggressive when you’re not.”

  It was the weirdest definition of vulnerable that I’d ever heard, but it also made a strange sort of sense. At least it did to me. I’d
thought I was ahead in my life until Jim had dropped the Tiffany bomb, and I’d suddenly discovered just how very vulnerable I was.

  Keeping score, I learned that evening, wasn’t any more straightforward in bridge than it was in real life.

  Henri turned out to be as demanding a client as he was a lover, which was saying something on both counts. I spent the next week running back and forth between his office, his apartment, and my house. I was faxing him invoices at a furious pace as my billable hours piled up, but to my consternation, none of them seemed to be getting paid.

  “Not to worry, ma chère,” Henri would purr. “The accounting department is a bunch of Italians who take a break every time the wind shifts directions.”

  Which was all fine and good except that my mortgage company did not operate on the same leisurely schedule.

  “Could you light a fire under them?” I asked Henri one night as we turned out the lights and slid into bed. I was spending more nights at his apartment than at my house. He made a very naughty remark about where else he would like to light a fire, and I forgot all about the unpaid invoices.

  Between assignments for Henri and my handful of other clients, I struggled to salvage the transportation for the Cannon Ball as the approaching deadline loomed.

  “Vanderbilt Valets,” the man at the parking service said when he answered the phone.

  “Yes, my name is Ellie Hall, and I’m with the Cannon Ball. I understand you handled the parking for last year’s event.”

  “Yes.”

  Okay, he wasn’t very forthcoming, which I took for a bad sign.

  “I’d like to book you for this year’s event.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “But you don’t even know the dates.”

  “It wouldn’t matter.”

  I tried to remember if I’d heard anything about last year’s transportation for the ball—some fiasco or disaster—but nothing came to mind.