by June Whyte
“Ms. Summers…Dani. I apologize for encroaching on your time, but I did leave a message with both your brother Robert and sister Penelope to contact me at their earliest convenience.” So that was the reason Penny insisted it was my turn to visit Mother. “But neither of your siblings returned my calls,” she went on. “So your visit today is quite auspicious.” Hell, the woman even sounded like my headmistress. Old Droopy Tits never used a simple word where a complex one would suffice.
I nodded, determined not to let her make me feel inferior. “Actually, Robert is out of the country on a business trip until the weekend. That would be the reason he hasn’t returned your call.” Penny could make her own excuses.
The immaculate Ms. Reeding stared down at her desk, tapped one finger nervously against the wood before moving a glossy American magazine on Aged Care a few centimeters to the right. “As you know, we encourage relationships here at Sunny Days, along with a very liberal lifestyle. Our motto has always been ‘Age has no barriers,’ so it’s not easy for me to say this, Danielle…it’s just that, well, your mother is….”
“Unpredictable?”
“Don’t get me wrong. Gwen is a lovely woman and we all adore her. It’s just that sometimes she can be a distracting influence on the other residents at the home.”
I frowned. This didn’t sound good. “Distracting? In what way?”
“In many ways, Danielle.”
“Can you be a bit more specific?”
“As in last week, when two male residents were planning to duel at dawn—winner take Gwen. Luckily, dawn is very early and both parties slept in. They rescheduled for midday but were prevented from carrying out their plan when one of the staff members rang the dinner gong. Since then, our counselors have defused the situation.”
She must have noticed my gob-smacked expression, because when she went on her tone was slightly less uptight. “The two men were only planning to use their canes as weapons, but even so, both residents find it difficult to balance without the support of their walking-stick. And if the duel had proceeded, one or both could have fallen over and been hurt.”
The picture Ms. Reeding painted was so ludicrous, I had trouble keeping a straight face. “And my mother?” I asked almost choking. “Did she in any way instigate this er…duel by walking stick?”
“Well, actually…no,” came the uncomfortable reply. “I believe Gwen told both men to grow up, that she wasn’t interested in either of them, and they could knock each other silly for all she cared, because she wasn’t a piece of meat to be fought over.”
“Now that sounds more like my mother.”
“But the point is, Gwen needs to tone down her flirtatious behavior.”
“I don’t see how—”
“And then there’s what’s been happening with Thomas.”
“Thomas?”
“You might know him as Tug.”
“Right,” I said, closing my eyes and slumping back in my chair. “The younger guy. Her toy-boy with connections to the Mob.”
“Yes, that’s the one.” Gloria Reeding leant forward, her eyes almost pleading. “Danielle, if you could speak to your mother and ask her not to encourage Thomas to dramatize his very slim connections to the underworld—and his stint in jail when he was caught in the getaway car way back in his teens—I’d really appreciate it. All this talk of glocks and switchblades and laundering money has started to scare some of the frailer residents.”
I sighed. This was so not like the interview Mum had with Droopy Tits back in the early seventies.
* * *
If you’ve never witnessed an eighty-three-year-old woman dressed in black suede knee-high boots, tight-fitting mint-green leggings and a plum-colored knitted coat-dress—wielding a scorecard and playing a game of darts with an entourage of aged men, two of them pushing walking frames—you’ve never met my mother, Gwen.
“Hey, sweetie, what brand of condoms did you buy for me? Ribbed? Ooh, I love the feel of those ribbed suckers,” she whispered in a voice loud enough for everyone—not only in the next room, but outside on the golf course—to hear.
I groaned. This could not be the woman who gave birth to me almost fifty years ago. It just couldn’t. The Gwen Summers I’d grown up with and fought with for my right to wear lipstick and control bras at fourteen, had been a June Cleaver clone. Now, six months after booking into Sunny Days, she’d turned into a senior Mata Hari.
“Hi, Mrs. S.,” cut in Simon, bending to plant a smacking kiss on my mother’s wrinkled cheek. Over her shoulder he winked and I grinned my thanks for his intervention. “You guys need any help to win today’s dart’s match?”
“Simon, honey, always lovely to see you,” said Mum, her flushed face crinkling into a smile. She turned to the other members of her dart’s team. “Hey, listen up. This fine specimen of manhood almost became my son-in-law,” she told Henry, Johnny with the full head of hair, Billy, Percy and bad-boy, Tug. “Luckily for him my uptight daughter, Penny dumped him.” She chuckled while giving Simon a sharp dig in the ribs. “And I bet you thank God every night for your lucky break. Anal retentive, I think they’d call Penny these days. Back in my day, we’d have called her a snotty-nosed bitch.”
“Penny isn’t that bad,” I protested.
“Penny is that bad!” my mother and Simon responded in unison.
Mum laughed and slapped Simon on the back. “Not that I wouldn’t love to have you as a son-in-law, Simon.” She peered across at me and lifted both eyebrows. “I do have another daughter, you know. Not real bright, but she has potential.”
“Muuum!” I yelled. “Behave yourself.”
Simon’s lopsided grin had the blood rushing to my face again. “Okay, team,” he said leaving me to my embarrassment while addressing Mum’s entourage like a life coach. “Let’s see if we can beat this other mob. Whose turn is it to attack the dart board?”
Henry shuffled forward, his skinny chicken legs encased in thick baggy trousers. “I think it’s my throw again. Is that right, Gwen?”
“Yes, Henry,” said Mum checking the scorecard. “And do try to hit the board this time, you silly bugger. Last time he hit the window, the light-fittings, the wall and even a passing care-worker. Everything but the dart board!”
While Henry digested Gwen’s criticism, I steered my mother to one side, determined to broach the subject of her promiscuity. “Mum,” I said in what I hoped was a serious, you’d-better-listen-to-me voice, “we need to talk.”
Her eyes never left Henry as he shuffled into position in front of the dart board. “We do?”
“Yes, we do. Gloria Reeding is unhappy with your behavior. She tells me that men are dueling over you and—”
“Load of rubbish. A bit of fun that got blown way out of hand. Neither of the men got any farther than the garden where the duel was set to take place. Sam found the nearest chair to collapse on and Robert forgot what the heck he was out there for. Lovely guys—but all talk. No action.”
Simon passed Henry a set of darts. “Okay, Henry,” he said, punching the old man lightly on one arm. “Let’s see your best winning technique.”
“Mum, what about Tug?” I continued, not letting her off the hook yet. “The guy’s keen on you and Ms. Reeding says you’ve been encouraging him to boast about his shady past.”
Mum shrugged and I noticed a tightening of her thin lips, a tiny crack in her armor. “I find listening to Tug rattle on about his dubious connections to the bad guys helps ease the boredom around this place,” she explained and I suddenly understood. Even Sunny Days couldn’t prevent the tedium of old age, with all its aches and pains and inevitable slowing down of body parts.
Henry’s chest puffed up like a bantam rooster as his gnarled fingers closed around the darts. “I used to be good at this,” he told us, and from behind his coke-bottle glasses he peered intently at the board, shuffled his feet to the right…and then aimed his dart at Simon.
“Not quite on target, mate,” said Simon, jumping
out of the way and then moving Henry around so he faced in the right direction. “Now, let’s see you score.”
Fascinated, I watched Henry nudge his thick glasses back up his nose and then let fly with his first dart. Amazingly, it hit the target. Nowhere near the bull’s-eye of course, but at least the dart landed on the board.
“Yay!” cheered Johnny, his full head of hair nodding rhythmically, as, hands shaking, he pushed his walking frame towards his elated teammate. “Good one, Henry. First hit for you today!”
“Well done, Henry!” Simon patted the excited Henry on the shoulder and proceeded to line him up for his next throw.
Warmth stole through me and I smiled as I watched Simon joke around with the guys for the next half-hour. And when the team won the match by default, due to a player from the opposing team wandering off halfway through the match, he offered to buy everyone a round of drinks. This was a side of Simon I hadn’t seen before. And I liked it.
“What about you, Dani?” he asked sending a grin in my direction. “Feel like a beer?”
“Nah. But I could murder an orange juice.”
“Okay, six beers and an orange juice coming up,” he said. “And who’s for potato chips?”
I watched six paper-thin hands wave in the air.
While the men gathered around the table to drink their beer, dissect the game and analyze every winning throw, my mother smiled and beckoned me to follow her as she walked across to the dart board to gather the darts together.
“Okay, I admit Tug can get a wee bit overzealous at times,” she said when I caught up to her, “but that’s because he finds me irresistible. All the men at Sunny Days flirt with me. They think I’m fun to be around.” She paused, and I watched her smile trickle away. “You know, Dani, I can’t believe how much I missed out on all those years I was married to your killjoy of a father. All those years I was so intent on keeping up appearances. And even after he died, God rest his soul, I was still so freakin’ uptight it’s a wonder I didn’t bore myself to tears.”
I didn’t butt in, just wrinkled my nose in agreement.
“So why the heck didn’t you tell me what a stuffed shirt I was?”
Luckily, Mum didn’t wait for me to answer. Probably because she knew that back then she wouldn’t have listened to me. More than likely would have refused to talk to me for a week, for being presumptuous.
“Now, for the first time in my life I’m really alive,” she went on, eyes lighting up as she spoke. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve realized that life is a gift. And when you wake up each morning, you’ve gotta grab that gift with both hands and run with it until it’s time to quit.”
“Wow, Mum, that’s very profound.”
“So,” she said, giving me a sly wink. “I’ve decided to spend my twilight years in a blaze of promiscuity. Which means that I’m going to get as much nooky as Henry and his Viagra can handle.”
Holy crap! “Umm…”
“But I’m digressing,” she went on as though we’d been discussing a day at the zoo instead of the Big Three—life, death and nooky. “I don’t know what our uptight Ms. Reeding is so fired up about—probably not getting any herself. But Henry knows I wouldn’t cheat on him. And Tug’s okay with that. He’s a nice lad. In fact, if I was a few years younger I might even ditch Henry for him.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Or take them both on in bed.”
“Muuum!”
Somehow, somewhere…someone had swapped my old-fashioned mother for a sex-crazed alien!
“Oh, Dani, stop being such a prude and lighten up,” the sex-crazed alien said. “Sex is fun. I don’t know why you don’t grab Simon by the chest hairs and drag him into your bed. He’s a good-looking stud and you’re missing out on all that fabulous testosterone.”
“Mum!” I snapped and jerked a quick glance across at Simon to see if he’d heard her ridiculous suggestion. Luckily, he was listening to Mavis, the feisty Centenarian of Sunny Days Retirement Home, who was likely telling him how she’d lived to a hundred by smoking, fornicating and eating lots of chocolate. “Simon and I are just friends,” I told my mother. “Once you bring sex into the equation it can ruin a perfectly good friendship.”
“It doesn’t have to, sweetie,” said Mum, giving me a quick hug. “Sex and friendship are the two top ingredients in a relationship. One’s no good without the other. I just didn’t know that until recently.”
“But Simon doesn’t think of me in that way,” I protested. “I’ve always been Penny’s little sister to him.”
“Poppycock! Every time the man eyeballs you he thinks of you ‘in that way.’ In fact, I could still end up as Simon’s mother-in-law.” When I shook my head at her she added, “Hey, you could do a lot worse. You’ve been a worry to me over the years you know. It’s way past time you were married to a good man who’ll love you and take care of you. If I were you I’d—”
“Can we get back to Tug? And the fact that Ms. Reeding—”
“Who is an idiot…?”
“Right,” I said, realizing the topic was closed. “So shall we rejoin the dart players? That glass of orange juice looks good to me.”
“And so does that gorgeous hunk you brought along with you. If I was you, Danielle, I wouldn’t wait for him to make a move, I’d jump his bones and play whoopee the moment I got him alone. Remember what I said before. Life’s a gift. So tear off the wrapping, girl, and enjoy the hard throbbing centre.”
As I said before, somehow, somewhere…someone had swapped my stuffed-shirt mother for a sex-crazed alien.
But strangely enough, I wasn’t fussed about getting my original mother back.
17
Thursday, 5:45 p.m.
Half an hour later, as I drove along the Main North Road towards Gawler, Simon, sitting in the passenger seat beside me, flipped his mobile phone closed and stowed it in his pocket.
“Been a new development,” he said turning to me. “We can’t search Jack’s house tonight.”
I almost smiled—at the last minute turning the smile into a frown. “Oh, dear,” I mumbled. “Bad luck.”
“That was my contact at Gape on the phone. He tells me Jack Rivers will be at home tonight. He also said a couple of club owners, both with suspected drug connections, arrived from interstate this morning. Our boy Jack has evidently offered them big money for a one-on-one interview in the privacy of his home.” He paused. “And there’s also talk of a ground-breaking scoop.”
“Yeah, but at whose expense? Some poor shmuck will be taken to the cleaners tomorrow morning when their shame is printed across the front page of Gape.”
“That’s a given,” agreed Simon. “And as for Mary’s murder, unfortunately, even though my gut instinct puts Jack Rivers seriously in the frame, I have no evidence. Not even a connection between them. Shame we have to postpone breaking into Jack’s house tonight.”
Oh yes, a real shame, I thought as my gut instinct screamed: Don’t break into Jack’s house any time! Not tonight! Not tomorrow! Not at all!
“We’ll do it in the morning, while he’s at work?”
My proverbial feet grew colder. “What if someone sees us?” I bleated. “We could end up in jail.”
“Dani, darlin’, don’t sweat it. We’ll be dressed as AGL meter readers. No one will give us a second glance. Anyway, I’ve found most people these days look the other way. They don’t want to get involved.”
Simon’s logic didn’t really comfort me. I’d always been one of those people who didn’t want to get involved. Although, since Mary’s killer had no qualms about involving me in his dastardly plans, it was time I hauled my head out of the sand and confronted the truth. Okay, so far I’d followed clues, interviewed the owners of The Fish Inn and even prodded Derek into spilling the beans—but breaking and entering—hell, that was something else again.
That was illegal.
My fingers tightened on the steering wheel while my stomach did a back flip. “Okay, I guess I’m with you,” I agreed. “If you’re
sure that’s the only option.”
“Do you honestly believe I’d break the law unless it was the only way to find out if Jack’s the murderer?”
I flicked a quizzical glance across at him and raised my eyebrows. “You can pick a lock?”
He grinned, his teeth flashing white. “Maximum twenty-five seconds.”
“Right,” I said and straightened my shoulders and squared my jaw. If Simon was willing to risk going to jail for me, the least I could do was provide back-up. “What time and where shall we rendezvous?”
“You’ve been watching too many crime shows, Ms. Summers,” he answered smiling.
God, I loved the way his whole face lit up when he smiled. “And you’ve been reading too many crime reports, ex-Detective Templar.”
When had I taken an interest in the way Simon smiled? He’d been smiling at me for over thirty years. And why was my heart beating so fast?
“Okay, you win,” he said with a chuckle. “But we’ll leave the details of our rendezvous until the morning. To be on the safe side, I’d better give my contact another ring. Confirm the perp’s movements.”
“Perp?”
“Police-speak.” His face lit up in another grin. “And talking of perpetrators—hasn’t your mother changed? Old Gwen’s a real go-getter since selling up and shifting into Sunny Days.”
“Don’t I know it!”
We’d left the gang at Sunny Days scuttling off to the dining room for their evening meal. Probably Oysters Kilpatrick with sticky date pudding for dessert. As soon as the gong had sounded, Henry—head down, bony shoulders hunched, walking-frame in top gear—had led the charge, the other residents hot on his trail.
As I swung into Murray Street, Gawler, the traffic lights changed to red so I slowed down and eased to a stop. “You know, I’ve never seen my mother look so happy.”
“Nor so sexy and alive,” he added leaning back in his seat as two teenage boys—both with iPods glued to their ears—crossed the road, their lanky adolescent legs pumping in time to the music. “Um…Dani,” Simon suddenly blurted, sounding like a high-school kid himself. “Wanna watch a Road Runner DVD with me, tonight?”
