Murder Boogies with Elvis

by Anne George

  I did as he said. Nothing happened.

  “Move back, you fool. You’re standing on the trapdoor.”

  This was no time to argue that I wasn’t a fool. I moved back, lifted the trapdoor, and saw what appeared to be a lighted room beneath it.

  “Climb down,” was the next order. And again, “Hurry.”

  I pulled the trapdoor back, said a little prayer, and lowered myself onto a dangling metal ladder that hung between the closet and the floor beneath. It was the kind of ladder that people who have bedrooms on upper stories keep under their beds in case of fire, the kind that hooks over a window, in this case a trapdoor. It swayed as I descended.

  “Now you,” I heard him tell Mary Alice.

  There was no way on God’s earth that Sister was going to be able to fit into that trapdoor. And if by some miracle she squeezed through, there was the fragility of the ladder, of the hundred fifty pounds more of Sister than there was of me. Just then my feet touched a carpeted floor. That was a plus. If the ladder broke or came loose, could I cushion her fall some way without getting smushed? I stood to one side, ready to do what I could. But Sister came through the trapdoor and down the ladder with no problem. Mr. Taylor scampered down behind her, holding on to the ladder with one hand, the pistol in the other still pointed at us.

  Afterward, thinking about this, I realized that if we hadn’t been so astonished at what we were seeing, we could probably have jumped him as he came down the ladder and knocked the pistol away. He wasn’t a large man or a young man, and there were two of us.

  We were standing in a Matisse painting. A deep burgundy carpet covered the floor. Atop this was an oriental rug in shades of orange and burgundy. There were several more rugs hanging on the wall and a circular table in the middle of the room with books stacked beside a large arrangement of red lilies. In the corner was an ornate brass bed covered by a floral throw, and on this bed lay a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl. Pure Matisse except for the fact that the girl was tied to the bed and had electrical tape over her mouth. Dusk Armstrong, her eyes large with fear.

  “My God,” Sister said.

  “Here.” Mr. Taylor handed her a roll of electrical tape. “Strap your sister to that pipe.”

  In spite of the ornateness of the room, we were in the bowels of the theater. Mr. Taylor had not been able to hide all of the pipes. He had, however, painted them pink. “Over here in the corner,” he said.

  Sister took the tape, tore a piece off, and taped my ankles to the pipe.

  “Feet and wrists both. And tight.” And to me, “Cross your arms.”

  Sister finished taping me to the pipe. Then it was her turn. Mr. Taylor told her to back up and taped her to a pipe that ran parallel to mine. He pulled off a piece of tape to put over her mouth and then changed his mind. “I’ll let you talk,” he said, laughing. “See if you two biddies can hatch up anything. You can’t be heard, you know.”

  Then he went over to Dusk, pulled the tape from her mouth, kissed her, and said, “You, too, my darling. I forgot about putting this on you. But such terrible language for a lady.” He turned and looked at us. “Well, I’ll be back in a few minutes. The recessional, you know. Don’t say anything bad about me.” He climbed the rope ladder, pulled it up behind him, and closed the trapdoor. We were imprisoned.

  Dusk began to cry. “Oh, y’all, I’m so sorry. How did you end up down here?”

  “Looking for Larry Ludmiller’s glasses,” I said. “I saw Maurice’s hair all over the hall. You threw it there deliberately, didn’t you?”

  “I left a trail of it. I was grabbing chunks of Maurice out while Mr. Taylor was trying to drag me out of the house.”

  Sister pulled ineffectually against her taped wrists. “I was about to call the police when that madman showed up.” She tugged again to no avail. “What’s wrong with him anyway?”

  “He’s crazy. He says he’s going to protect me, that he’s loved me since I used to come and watch Dawn in the Miss Alabama pageants. Oh, God. He’s been stalking me for years, and I didn’t even know it.”

  “He knew about Griffin then?” I asked.

  “Of course he did.” Dusk tried to wipe her face on her arm. Not easy. Her arms were tied above her head. “He killed him to protect me, so he says. And I’m so stupid. I thought it was Day who had killed him to protect me.” Dusk gave a half laugh, half sob. “And she thought I had done it because I was so scared I was going to prison for marrying him.”

  I looked at Mary Alice, but she seemed to be lost in thought. Would she believe me capable of murder? Would she murder someone to protect me? She would if the situation were life threatening, I realized. But Griffin Mooncloth had been a situation that Dusk had entered foolishly. He was no life threat. And the sisters’ jumping to the wrong conclusions about each other had caused so much trouble, including my being arrested, Larry Ludmiller almost being killed, and God knows what was going to happen. And yet, I rationalized, they had been trying to protect each other.

  My hands were beginning to go to sleep. I leaned my head back against the pipe and took a deep breath. Even the ceiling, I realized, was covered with the burgundy carpet. Mr. Taylor had worked down here for years to create this room, this place to bring his beloved. Oh, my God.

  “The Phantom of the Opera,” I said to Sister.

  “I know. Probably upstairs right now sawing the chandelier loose in the Hall of Mirrors.”

  “He’s not going to let us out of here alive,” I said. “We’ve messed up his plans.”

  Sister seemed strangely calm. “He’ll have to take us out to kill us. Or he’ll take Dusk somewhere else and leave us here. My bet is that he’ll take us out. This is his lair.”

  I began to get the shakes. “So if he takes us somewhere like Huntsville, shoots us, and throws us in a ditch, we’re still dead.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Dusk moaned.

  “But he’s got a problem. He’ll have to undo both of us and get us up the ladder. And the one who gets upstairs into the closet first runs like hell. And that’ll be you, Mouse.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I can’t fit through the trapdoor.”

  “You fit coming down.”

  “I was thinking thin.”

  “You were thinking thin?”

  “It’s part of Eastern philosophy. You know the class I was taking at UAB? You think of yourself as a long silver shaft of light, and you can slip right through things.”

  “Well, can’t you slip back up?”

  “It’s harder. Gravity works against you going up. There’s only so much mind over matter. But Mr. Taylor will have to go up the ladder ahead of you so he can hold the gun on you. Then I’ll get stuck in the trapdoor, and you run like hell.”

  I wailed almost as loud as Dusk. My sister had lost her mind. “He’ll shoot us both.”

  “I doubt it. He’s going to be too worried about me blocking his way to his room and Dusk. You should have a few minutes.”

  “Maybe I could hit him over the head with something in the broom closet.”

  Sister shook her head. “Just run like you’ve never run before. Run toward the street because the wedding party will probably be gone by then.”

  “Run,” Dusk echoed. “Run like hell.”

  I would have wrung my hands if I could. “There’s got to be another way. I can’t leave you stuck in a trapdoor with a maniac.”

  “Then you tell me what it is.”

  I couldn’t, of course.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Dusk closed her eyes and seemed to be sleeping. Maybe Mr. Taylor had given her something. Mary Alice’s eyes were open but had a distant look in them. Maybe she was imagining herself a silver shaft of light. As for me, I was wondering if I would ever see Joanna. And Fred would miss me so.

  “What’s going to happen to Fred?” I whispered.

  “He’ll marry Tiffany.”

  “That’s not a damn bit funny.”

  “Then shut up and let me think.”

&
nbsp; “Are you thinking you’re a blue flame or something?”

  “Just shut up.”

  I lapsed into silence. Maybe if we beat on the pipes? But what did we have to beat on them with but our heads. I thought of the wedding party above us, going out now into the bright warm sunshine of a March day. Going to the reception, probably at the Highland Raquet Club, trying to dance in those hoop skirts. The beauty of the recessional being played by a man who had three women tied up in an exotic room somewhere beneath the street. “Thank you, Mr. Taylor,” they would say. “It was lovely.” And the father of the bride would tip him lavishly.

  Had he been trying to decide what to do with us while he sat at the Mighty Wurlitzer? Of course he had. And now he was back to carry out whatever plan he had decided on. We heard the trapdoor being opened, the chain of the ladder clinking as it unfurled and fell to the floor.

  Sister and I glanced at each other as Mr. Taylor came down the ladder. He was the least villainous man I had ever seen, small, neatly dressed in a tux, his scarce red hair so plastered with hair oil that you could see the tracks of every comb tooth. But his eyes belied the meek, ordinary look.

  “Now what?” he said. We didn’t answer, so he answered himself. “Now I have to get rid of you two pests.”

  I tried to visualize running down the hall. Which way to the street? What if the doors were locked?

  He went over and ran his hand lovingly down Dusk’s arm. “So beautiful.” She didn’t stir.

  “She hates you, you know,” Sister said. “She told us when you touched her it makes her sick.”

  Mr. Taylor turned toward Sister, his face contorted.

  “You’re not the Phantom of the Opera,” she continued. “You’re nothing but the substitute organist at the Alabama.”

  “Shut up, you twit.”

  “What did you call me?” Sister asked.

  “A twit. Twit, twit, twit.” On each “twit” he took a step forward until he was standing in front of her.

  “Yaaa!” Sister screamed her martial arts yell as her foot came up and delivered the hardest kick I’ve ever seen right between Mr. Taylor’s legs. He dropped like a sack of potatoes, and she was on top of him pulling the gun from his pocket. “I hope I broke them, you bastard. I hope you never use them again.”

  From the looks of him, there was a good chance that she was going to get her wish. In a fetal position, he retched into the oriental rug.

  Dusk woke up. “What?” she asked.

  But Mary Alice was untaping me and telling me to run like hell for help. “Tell them to bring something to widen the trapdoor. No way I can get out of there.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were loose, and how did you do it?” I asked.

  “You would have looked guilty. And I just rocked back and forth and stretched the tape.”

  As I headed up the stairs, she was using the tape that had been on me to secure Mr. Taylor. I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of anyone in my life.

  “She thought herself thin?”

  Fred and I had just turned off the eleven o’clock news where we had watched ambulance attendants carrying Mr. Taylor from the Alabama Theater. He was covered in a blanket as they brought him out, but you could tell that even on the gurney he was still in a fetal position.

  I nodded against his shoulder. We were in bed snuggling. He might marry Tiffany when I was gone, but, by damn, I was going to give her something to live up to.

  “She says she learned it in a class on Eastern philosophy. You think of yourself as a silver blade of light or a blue flame or something like that, and you can slip right through things.”

  “I don’t believe a word of that,” Fred said. “I’ll bet Mr. Taylor just shoved her through the trapdoor.

  “She was still wonderful. Worked her way right out of that tape and didn’t say a word. I didn’t have any idea she’d done it.”

  We lay quietly for a few minutes. Outside, the March wind had picked up, and the shadows on the window shades were dancing. I was on the verge of sleep when Fred said, “You know, honey, she didn’t have to kick him as hard as she did.”

  I smiled. And then I fell over the cliff into sleep.

  Twenty

  May fourteenth was a perfect day, weather-wise. A late cold front had slipped through Alabama and the temperature was in the seventies with a light breeze. The old country church at Tannehill State Park is simply one large rectangular room with benches, an aisle down the middle, and windows down both sides. At the front is a slightly raised platform where the minister stands. No dressing rooms, no bathrooms. But the park is undergoing a restoration. It was the site of the first steel mill in the state, built in the early 1800s. The Yankees took care of that. But someone came up with the idea of moving some authentic 1800 cabins to the park, so we could appreciate how our ancestors lived. (They didn’t live very well.) And frequently there are Civil War reenactments in the Tannehill woods.

  On Sister’s wedding day, there was no reenactment, fortunately, since the soldiers tend to do a lot of rebel yelling. But somehow she had managed to get the use of one of the cabins for the bridesmaids to finish getting ready.

  We each had on a dress that we had picked out ourselves. The only stipulations were that they be floor length and that our shoes match the color of the dress. We agreed that was fair enough. So Sister had us reach in a hat and pull out the color. Tammy Sue got yellow, but Haley swapped blue with her. Virgil’s other daughter, Deena, had declined the invitation to be in the wedding, but I think she was sorry when she saw how much fun we were having.

  Haley looked beautiful. She had been home six weeks and was at the good stage of pregnancy. Marilyn, however, was a different matter. She was dressed in lavender and every time I looked at her I thought of the song with the lyrics about “lavender’s green.”

  “I don’t think I can make it,” she kept saying. But she did, thanks to the tea and crackers that Bonnie Blue kept handing her.

  My dress was a pale pink, and Debbie’s was a darker pink. Mary Alice, of course, had on the Rubenesque dress, which was a work of art.

  Bonnie Blue lined us up, and we walked single-file up a path to the church, trying not to scuff our shoes in the pine straw or snag our dresses on the wild hydrangeas that bloomed on both sides of us. Ray, Sister’s son, hadn’t been able to make it home from Bora Bora for the wedding, so she had asked Fred to give her away. He had said, “Gladly.”

  The men were waiting for us at the church. Good-looking, all of them, I decided. Even Buddy in his Elvis outfit. A little strange, but that was okay. Bonnie Blue slipped into the church, and in a minute we heard the first notes of Beethoven’s Sixth, the Pastoral Symphony. There was no piano in the church, no organ, thank God. But there was electricity.

  “Here we go,” somebody said.

  The wedding party almost filled up the church. The groomsmen were Mary Alice’s sons-in-law, Henry and Charles; her nephew (and Haley’s huband), Philip; and my sons, Freddie and Alan. Buddy Stuckey was his father’s best man. Larry Ludmiller was doing much better, but Tammy Sue had decided he’d better not stand that long.

  “Too many men anyway,” Bonnie Blue grumbled. “Y’all don’t match up.”

  We marched down the aisle toward the altar that was banked with spring flowers. I smiled at Miss Bessie and Bo Mitchell. At Mitzi and Arthur Phizer, Pukey Lukey and Virginia. Fairchild Weatherby, an old boyfriend of Mary Alice’s, was already wiping his eyes. I looked around. So were several other men.

  And then Sister came down the aisle and married Virgil Stuckey. The only surprise was when the minister said that Virgil, Jr., had asked to sing a song in honor of his father and his bride. This was right after Fred had given her away and had sat down in the front row by Bonnie Blue.

  Virgil and Sister both looked startled, but Buddy Stuckey stepped forward and sang “Love Me Tender” so much like Elvis that it was eerie. To tell the truth, it was the highlight of the wedding.

  The photographer
got a lot of pictures of Sister and Virgil on the steps, and then we headed back to Birmingham for the reception on the lawn at Sister’s house. Half the city was there partying. I’m sure every drugstore in town was out of aspirin the next day.

  Sister and Virgil didn’t change out of their wedding clothes. Sister hiked up her cream-colored satin dress and climbed into the RV. That’s when I saw the purple boots and started crying.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” Fred said, putting his arms around me. “They’re not going to make it as far as Gardendale.”

  He was right. They made it only as far as the street before Virgil stopped the RV, and Sister jumped out.

  “Mouse!” she yelled.

  “What?”

  “You and Fred go with us.”

  “We can’t,” I said, running down the driveway.

  “It’s fine with Virgil.”

  That was when Virgil got out and announced, “The hell it is. Get back in, Mary Alice.”

  Fred caught up with me and scooped me up. Virgil and Sister got back into the RV, and they turned out of the driveway.

  “I love you, man,” Fred shouted.

  Virgil’s arm came out in a wave as they drove off.

  Fred slung me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and patted me on the behind. He was showing off, of course, but it was really rather nice. Caveman-ish. He chuckled as we started back toward the party.

  He staggered about three steps before he put me down, but I thought that was right impressive. We walked the rest of the way, slowly, holding hands.

  “Mrs. Hollowell?” Tiffany was on the steps holding out a cell phone. “It’s Mrs. Crane. I mean Mrs. Stuckey.”

  I took it. “Sister?”

  “Is Fred all right? I saw the Mr. Macho bit.”

  “Huffing and puffing so hard he could blow down the little pig’s brick house.” Fred frowned and walked over to join Haley and Philip. “Where are y’all?”

  “Going by Vulcan Park. Do you think everything went all right?”

  “Beautiful. Let me go inside and sit down so we can talk.”