Murder On the Mississippi Queen

by Serena B. Miller

  Lula came hurrying on back to my room after the boy had left her at hers.

  “So,” Lula Faye said. “What do you think?”

  All I could do was sit there all goggle-eyed. “I think I need to get me a job on this here boat because I don’t never want to leave!”

  She laughed and sat down beside me. “Remember when we used to talk about what it would be like to be one of them rich people who could afford to take trips on these things?”

  “I surely do.”

  “Well,” she fell back against the bed, tossing her feet in the air and giggling. “I guess some dreams come true, ‘cause here we are!”

  Lula Faye was a giggler when we were young but I hadn’t heard that giggle for a long time and I realized I’d missed it. That’s what this moment felt like to me right now, like the years had fallen away from me and my cousin and we were telling secrets to each other back in our granny’s upstairs bedroom. Except whoever put this room together was a lot better decorator than our granny ever was. Later on, after I’d had supper and took my shower, said my prayers, and crawled beneath them sheets—well, Granny’s rough-dried sheets felt like sandpaper compared to them on the Mississippi Queen. There’s a reason them river cruises cost so much.

  First thing we did after I’d put my few things in one of the drawers and shoved my satchel out of sight in the back of the little closet, was we went exploring on the boat. At first it bothered me a little trying to walk on deck with the shore line scooting along beside me. Made me feel a little caty-wampus in my head and I kept listing over to one side until I got used to it. Everyone acted nice to us although I had a sneaking suspicion they thought I’d just escaped for a break from the kitchen. People were dressed up a little bit more than even I had expected. I guess when you spend thousands of dollars to sail down the river it stands to reason you’d dress up to honor that fact.

  Eventually we ran across a small dress shop and Lula Faye was determined I try on some new clothes. Nobody else was in the shop, so me and Lula Faye had a big time playing dress up. I made the mistake of asking the sales clerk how much everything cost, and about had a heart-attack when she told me.

  “I’ll just put everything back real careful like,” I said.

  “No.” Lula Faye whipped out a shiny new black platinum credit card. “This is on me.” Then she started instructing the sales clerk to gather up this and that for herself and a whole lot of other things she thought I needed.

  “I can’t let you do that.” I grabbed her arm. I meant what I said. No way was I was going to let Lula Faye pay for my clothes too. Her paying for the boat ride was bad enough.

  Lula Faye shook my hand off. “I can’t spend what I got if I spend like crazy for the rest of my life,” she said. “This will make me happy.”

  Then she handed the card to the sales clerk. “Don’t take a penny from her for anything,” Lula Faye said. “I mean it.”

  I stood back and watched while that clerk folded away all them pretty things in white tissue paper and fancy boxes. That’s not something they do at the Dollar Store.

  A young crew member took our purchases to our rooms while me and Lula Faye argued.

  “I weren’t raised taking no handouts,” I told Lula Faye. “I ain’t wearing these. I’m taking them back soon as you’re not around.”

  “You ever read them Victorian novels where an old woman hires a companion to travel with her?” Lula Faye said. I guess I need to tell you that she was always reading novels when she was young.

  “I guess,” I said, although I never did.

  “Think of it like that. I didn’t want to take the trip alone and I hired you to go with me,” she said.

  “Hornswaggled me into it is more like it,” I said.

  “Consider yourself my employee if it makes you feel any better, and the clothes as part of the deal,” Lula Faye said. “Seriously. This wasn’t your idea to come along. I did hornswaggle you. I also needed to get out of town for a while and I didn’t want to go alone. Like I said before. Relax and enjoy it.”

  And so I did. I might be old, and I might be honest, and I might be determined to pay my own way. But I ain’t stupid.

  Our trip was going to take us all the way to New Orleans and then back up the Ohio River. Lula Faye had gotten one of the longer cruises they offered. So there we went, floating down that big ole’ Ohio River with calliope music playing at every town, a big paddle wheel turning, and us a’hanging over the rail, waving to the people on the river bank.

  If people could have seen inside of us, they would have seen two little girl cousins dreaming dreams and feeling the river wind in our hair. No doubt we just looked like two old fools too excited to act like we had good sense and you know what? I didn’t care. Not too many people get to live their dream, but I was living mine. At least for the next few days.

  “Now aren’t you happy you came?” Lula Faye said. “I told you we’d have fun.”

  Well actually, she hadn’t said that we’d have fun. What she said was she needed to get out of town but I was too happy to care.

  It don’t pay to let yourself get too happy, my mama always said. She said if you get too happy it draws the attention of the devil and it’s best for a body never to do that. The devil is a wily creature that don’t want nobody to be happy and will find underhanded ways to make you miserable that you don’t see coming. My mama was almost always right.

  “Well, hello there!” A man in a fancy suit was walking along the deck and tipped his hat. Men don’t wear hats all that much anymore unless it’s a baseball cap, but he was wearing a formal black one. He saw us waving at the river bank and giggling together so he stopped and leaned against the railing beside us. “You ladies seem to be having a jolly good time.”

  It seemed odd to hear the words “jolly good” coming from a grown man’s mouth, but he had a British accent so I figured it was okay. Not something I was used to hearing in South Shore, Kentucky though.

  “Oh, we are!” Lula Faye said gaily. “We are just having the best time!”

  I glanced over at where he was standing on the other side of Lula Faye. She was looking out at the shore line like she wasn’t paying no attention to him. The Ohio is a pretty river and has nice scenery. He didn’t seem to notice me watching him. The expression on his face wasn’t like a man just being friendly, it was like he was evaluating her.

  It made me shiver for an instant but I didn’t want to let anything rain on our little parade, so I brushed it off. I told myself he was just one nicely dressed, well-spoken middle-aged man passing the day. Nothing to be afraid of. After a bit, he wished us a “good day” and wandered off.

  You’d think by the time a woman hits seventy-two she’d know enough to pay attention when someone gives her the shivers, but not Yours Truly. Nope. Our preacher’s always telling us to think the best of everybody and I try to. That kind of thinking might work for being around God-fearing people from South Shore who might be sitting beside you in a pew, but it don’t always work out in the real world. I shoulda seen right then and there that the man with a fancy-sounding accent was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  But I told myself I was just being silly, and went back to enjoying the scenery myself.

  Lula Faye turned and kinda looked after him a mite longer than she should have as he walked away.

  “That was a nice man,” she said.

  “Uh huh.” I was certain I saw a snapping turtle floating along on top of the water.

  “Good-looking, too.” Lula Faye said.

  “Uh huh.” I wondered what it would feel like to have a big house like the one I was watching pass by with a pretty yard that went all the way down to a river dock.

  That was a mistake. I shoulda been paying more attention. I shoulda gone to the ship’s captain that very instant and told him to pull over and let me drag Lula Faye off the boat. But I didn’t. I was concentrating way too hard on having a good time. I’d also allowed myself to forget who Lula Faye’s mama was
. All them years of Lula Faye’s being a good Baptist had lulled me into a false sense of security. Her playing the lottery could have warned me that her Baptist training was starting to wear a little thin. Sometimes apples really don’t fall far from the tree.

  Supper (although they called it ‘dinner’ on the boat like city people do) was a dress-up affair. We both went to our room and primped beforehand. That’s what the new dresses were for, Lula Faye had informed me.

  It’s been a long, long time since I thought I was worth anyone’s time to bother to look at. I got a tolerable good mind and more determination than is probably good for me at my age, but I don’t get many second glances. If I do I usually check to see if my slip is dragging on the ground or if I’m trailing toilet paper from my shoes.

  I kind of enjoyed getting ready for dinner. I slipped on my favorite of the pretty dresses, and brushed my hair back. The new girl down at the beauty shop had cut it shorter than usual and I was beginning to warm up to the length of it. Then I put on my new sparkly ear bobs and necklace and slipped my feet into new shiny black low-heeled shoes, and then I turned around, took a good long look at myself in the full-length mirror and just about lost my teeth.

  I’ve never run to fat like some of my daddy’s people. I inherited some height from him, too, and I’ve always done hard work so my skin don’t sag as much as some old ladies. The silver-black dress Lula Faye had bought me hung just right. My hair, wearing that dress, looked more silver than gray.

  Like I said before, sometimes it seems like a person turns old overnight. One day you’re six years old playing marbles in the dirt, and the next thing you know you’re sixty and having a hard time getting up out of a low chair. I’d never been a good-looking girl. I weren’t cute and cuddly as a kid, and I was awkward and gangly as a young woman. I was tall and what my mama called “raw boned.”

  I don’t have any big mirrors at home. Just Mama’s bureau mirror that shows what you look like from the waist up, and then there’s the mirror over the sink in the bathroom. I’ve never been one for looking into mirrors in the first place. What I hadn’t never noticed before was that the rawboned awkwardness of my younger days had gone away, and what I saw in that full-length mirror was a tall woman with short silver hair wearing a dress that made her look strong and dignified.

  I was not beautiful by any means, not even close, but I looked like a woman who’d faced life head on and done the best she could with what she was given. My hands weren’t exactly dainty, but they were capable hands. They could grow their own food, or put together a nice quilt, or wring a chicken’s neck and pluck it if need be to keep from going hungry. As I stared at the woman in the mirror I realized that I looked like a person I’d want to know…and that was a revelation.

  Not everyone in this world likes themselves. Seems that there are a lot of people who spend most of their lives being about half-mad at everyone else for who and what they’ve let themselves become, or trying to pretend to be something they’re not. But none of that had ever been a problem to me. I was who I was and somehow with the help of a nice dress, that feeling somehow translated itself into the dignified woman I saw in that mirror.

  “Well don’t you look nice!” Lula Faye’s eyes lit up when she came to my door and saw me. “I guess I won’t scare nobody.”

  “Not in that dress, you won’t,” Lula Faye said. “We’re stopping for a few hours at Cincinnati tomorrow. Maybe we’ll get to do some more shopping. I think I’m getting the knack of spending money now that I don’t have the whole town watching over my shoulder.”

  I have to admit, as much as it shames me now, the prospect of spending more of Lula Faye’s money was starting to appeal to me, too.

  “Just promise me you won’t go finding any more dead bodies this trip,” Lula Faye said.

  She laughed at her little joke and so did I. It didn’t seem like nothing bad could ever happen on this lovely boat.

  And that was my next mistake. Getting lulled into thinking we were safe just because everything was so nice and grand and beautiful. The Bible says that the Devil is always out there roaming around like a hungry lion looking for someone to eat up and I’m here to tell you that that’s the God’s honest truth.

  We walked into the dining room for dinner and as I looked over the sea of white hair, I noted that most of our fellow travelers were about the age to have been on the Lawrence Welk show back when it was still being broadcast live. That made sense I suppose. Not too many young people, especially them with kids, can afford to ride on the Mississippi Queen. Some of the women were wearing jewelry that probably cost a whole lot more than my house.

  So I was surprised when Lula Faye and I were escorted to the Captain’s table. I mean, we were just nobodies from South Shore. It turned out that the fancy-suited man had recognized Lula Faye from a picture he’d seen in a newspaper and he’d informed the captain that the ship had a celebrity in its midst. We didn’t know about all that at the time, of course. That came later.

  As we approached the table, I glanced at the captain who was standing at the head of it and I immediately began digging around in my mind trying to figure out why he looked so familiar.

  Then he introduced himself and I knew exactly why he looked familiar. For a minute the coincidence of who he was took my breath away and I could barely speak.

  He had aged well. Very well. He had a military bearing and a comfort about meeting people that had been missing when he was nineteen, which was the last time I’d seen him. Here I was, on the Mississippi Queen, being introduced to the only boy who’d ever kissed me or even acted like he wanted to.

  Most people probably have a love story of some kind tucked away in their hearts. Even if that love story was only a private crush on someone and nobody ever knew about it. Captain Evan Wilson was my one and only love story. It weren’t much of a one but it was the only one I ever had.

  I thought I had put that story away a long time ago but it turned out to my surprise that it made me a little dizzy meeting up with him like this. It felt like I imagined it would feel if a person came up from the depths of the ocean too quickly and got the bends. I felt a little sick to the stomach, a little woozy in the head, and definitely weak in the knees. Of course the uniform he was wearing didn’t exactly hurt my eyes.

  I’m just an old fool. That’s what I am.

  I counseled at a local church camp one summer when I was nineteen and there was this walk under the stars to my cabin with a tall young man I’d come to admire. Suddenly there was this quick, surprising, good-night kiss. Unfortunately, that kiss came too late in the summer to follow up on. It was the night before the campers and counselors scattered back to their homes the next morning.

  He was from Lexington, which seemed like a world away back then when most kids didn’t have cars and long-distance telephone calls were expensive and saved for emergencies only. But writing letters was still an option. Not an option I felt I could initiate, though. Girls didn’t do things like that back then. At least good girls didn’t. In the confusion of getting the campers sorted out and parents trying to talk to me about their kids, the morning passed way too quickly.

  I guess someone came to give Evan a ride home and I never saw him ever again.

  I heard a rumor through a friend of a friend that he joined the Navy a month after camp let out. I never heard another word about him, or from him.

  It was soon after that I got my job at Selby Shoe Company and I put any thoughts about Evan Wilson behind me. I eventually heard he’d made a career out of the Navy. That was all I knew. Daddy got sick and I needed to help Mama take care of him. That one evening walk to my cabin during summer camp was my one little flutter of excitement over a boy. It weren’t much but I never forgot it.

  Introductions were made all around the table. I have to admit, I didn’t pay much attention to what was being said. I was too busy giving myself a talking to. Doreen, I was saying. Try to act like you got good sense. There’s no way on earth that i
mportant man is going to remember you.

  “Doreen Sizemore,” I said, and shook hands with him. I was determined not to act like I’d ever known him. He’d probably kissed a lot of women over the years. I was certain he’d forgotten that one little itty bitty kiss and the awkward girl he gave it to such a long, long time ago.

  There’s some men who get better looking with age and Evan Wilson was one of ‘em. I couldn’t help but notice the fact that there was no wedding ring on his finger.

  “Doreen Sizemore?” He kinda cocked his head to one side and focused in on me. “I used to know a Doreen Sizemore. It was at summer camp in Kentucky when I was nineteen. Right before I joined the Navy. We were both counselors.”

  I’ve had a long life and I’ve seen a lot of things. There’s not much that embarrasses or bothers me anymore. At least I thought it didn’t. But my old heart betrayed me. I felt myself flushing until it felt like I was as red in the face as the red roses they had sitting in a vase in the middle of the table.

  Lula Faye was busy talking with the man in the fancy suit with the British accent but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to that. I was too busy trying to stop myself from blushing like a school girl. I wished the captain would look at someone else while I got my composure back. But he didn’t and I didn’t.

  “Yes, I was at summer camp,” I croaked.

  “I thought that was you,” he said. “You still have that swimmer’s build and I’d remember them dark eyes anywhere.”

  Swimmer’s build? I had a swimmer’s build? I never knew that. He remembered my eyes?

  If there had been a couch handy I’d of probably swooned onto it.

  “I remember how you used to dive headfirst into the water from the float they had out in the middle of the lake. You were so graceful and such a strong swimmer. I enjoyed watching you.”