"Now, Julia," Lilah Rose was saying.
I interrupted. "It's Callahan now. Sounds more businesslike, and I like it better anyway."
"Sure, sugar," she said. "Anyway, I just remembered. I saw Noreen Deal at Junior League a couple months ago, and she said you'd left the police department to become a private investigator. So how on earth did you get into housecleaning from being a private eye?"
"I guess Noreen didn't hear I got out of security consulting." (Noreen Deal's mother is an old pal of Edna's.) "Earlier this year I had an opportunity to put some of my equity from the security business into this cleaning business. My accountant swears by diversification, you know."
OK, she didn't need to hear that my accountant was also my mother. And that I'd folded the private investigation business before it got me any deeper in the red than I already was.
Lilah Rose waved a hand. "Lord, don't I know about diversification! Bo has so many businesses I can't keep up with them all."
Before we could get any further into the girly-girl chitchat, a child's high-pitched scream erupted in the next room, followed by a wail, followed by the clatter of little feet headed our way. Suddenly two small children shot into the room and stationed themselves in front of Lilah Rose.
The older, a boy of about six, with sandy blond hair, pale blue eyes, and white-blond lashes, was dressed in one of those ridiculous short-all outfits. Long skinny legs stuck out from the shorts and ended in black cowboy boots. He was holding a wooden train engine in his hand and attempting to land a blow with it on the head of the other child, obviously his sister. She was about four, with the same eyes and hair, only her bob was topped by an enormous taffeta bow. She was dressed in a hand-smocked buttercup-yellow frock, with little white anklets and white kid shoes, with which she was delicately trying to kick her brother in the crotch.
"I'll kill you, you damn pest!" the boy shouted, clonking the girl over the head with the engine. The girl screamed in anger and pain and butted him in the stomach with her head. The two fell to the pastel dhurrie in a heap and started an all-out brawl.
Lilah Rose clapped her long acrylic-nailed hands together ineffectively. "Carter DuBose Beemish, stop that, you hear me? Meredith Ledbetter Beemish, get up right this instant!" The children, now engaged in trying to gouge each other's watery blue eyes out, ignored her.
"Stop it. Stop it right now," Lilah Rose shrieked, to no avail. Finally, she knelt down and slapped the boy's bare leg smartly with the palm of her hand. He screamed but quit trying to kill his sister and stood up.
"Mama," he said indignantly, "you know we don't hit. You hurt my feelings."
Tears welled up in Lilah Rose's eyes. "Oh, sugar, you're right. Mother is sorry, but she wanted you to stop hurting each other. Mother doesn't like her children to be angry at each other."
I fixed the children with a stare. Little beasts. I'd never had any children, probably wouldn't either, at this rate, but if these two had been mine, I'd have slapped them into the next county if they acted that way.
The little girl rose slowly and straightened her dress. "Mama," she wailed, though dry-eyed, "I'm feeling neglected and unhappy."
Lilah Rose gathered the children into her arms, stroking their mussed cornsilk hair. "Of course you are, sugar booger," she crooned. "Mother knows." She gave the children a final dose of effective parenting and a parting hug. "Scoot along now to Kristee, my loves. Mother wants to talk to this nice lady."
The boy blinked. "Kristee isn't here, Mama. We haven't seen her all morning."
His mother looked at the thin gold watch on her wrist. "Of course she's here, precious. She's probably out in the kitchen fixing you a snack."
The little girl stopped picking her nose and shook her head slowly. "No, she's not. She's not in the kitchen and she's not upstairs in her room and she's not out in the playhouse. Me and Carter looked. And her clothes are gone from her room. Mama, maybe Kristee ran away."
Lilah Rose sighed. "Excuse me, Callahan. Kristee is the children's nanny. She's Mormon, you know, from Utah. They are really so marvelous with children. She's supposed to take the children to a birthday party today. Let me just hunt her up and I'll be right down. Or, if you like, you could get started in the kitchen. Mrs. Garrity did say you do kitchens, right?"
I nodded and headed out the front door for the van, where I kept a rolling trolley full of cleaning supplies.
It took a few minutes to double-check the supplies and wrestle the vacuum cleaner out of the built-in rack in the side of the van and onto the bottom shelf of the trolley. I looked around past the garage and saw a door that looked to be the kitchen, so I headed that way.
Inside, Lilah Rose was talking into a white wall phone, in a voice that said she wasn't talking tennis dates. The freckles on her face stood out in relief, and the tan had turned a greenish shade.
"Yes, goddammit, I'm sure, Bo. I tell you she's not here. Her clothes are gone from her room.... No, the Mercedes is in the garage."
She stopped when she heard me enter and turned her back toward me. She lowered her voice, but I could still hear some of what she was saying.
"I think you better come home right away. Kristee's gone, and she didn't go empty-handed." There was a pause, and then her voice rose again. "I am not hysterical, I tell you, and I have no intention of taking a Valium. You just get home here and figure out what we're going to do about this!"
She slammed the phone down and began scrabbling around in a kitchen drawer. Finally her hand emerged, holding a pack of ultra-long menthol cigarettes and a silver filigree lighter. She lit up and sank down into a chair in the breakfast area.
I stood there frozen, not knowing whether to start cleaning or ask what was wrong.
"Goddamned Mormons. Supposed to be so damned dependable. Don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck. Right? And we find the one fucking Mormon in Utah who does all of the above. She's probably halfway to fucking Salt Lake City by now."
I busied myself with a cleaning rag, spraying some Windex on the stainless-steel restaurant range.
After a few more minutes of ranting about jewelry and whatnot, Lilah Rose seemed to realize I was in the room again.
"I guess you've gathered we're in somewhat of a crisis here, Callahan," she said slowly. "I'm just wondering if you couldn't help us out a little bit with this problem that's come up."
I stopped working on a grease spot on the back burner and pushed a hunk of hair out of my eyes. "I'm sorry, Lilah Rose," I said quickly. "House Mouse doesn't do child care. We don't have the insurance for it. We're strictly cleaning."
She laughed, but this time the tinkle was gone. "No, no, I don't mean with the children. I'll call a nanny agency here in town and get a temporary sent over today. What I need help with is more in the line of what you used to do, if you know what I mean."
I put the Windex back on the cart and sat down at the breakfast table. "Lilah Rose, maybe you better tell me what's going on."
3
THE LAST THING I NEEDED WAS to get back into the private detective business. No, House Mouse might be boring, but it was steady and safe, and if I could keep the equipment running and the girls healthy and out of jail, I looked to make a profit, albeit a small one, for my first year in business.
That said, we could really use some extra money. And my nosy gene wouldn't let me let it alone. Nosiness runs in my family, particularly among the women. My grandmother was a famous busybody in the small Florida town where she grew up, and Edna Mae—well, she managed the same beauty parlor for twenty years, and she didn't stay because the pay was so great. Beauty parlor gossip is generally high-octane stuff, and Edna Mae was hopelessly hooked. Although she supposedly works for me these days, she still subs on the books maybe one day a month at her friend Frank's place, the Salon de Beaute.
But back to Lilah Rose's problem, which I found absolutely irresistible. Lilah stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette in a small famille rose ashtray that sat on the glass-topped breakfast table and shakily
lit another one.
"Well, as you've gathered, Kristee has taken a powder. Kristee may not even be her real name, I guess. But whatever her name is, the little bitch is a thief, a con artist, and a conniving little slut." She smiled a sad half smile. "It's not bad enough she was sleeping with my husband. When she left she took the family silver, some of my jewelry, the best pieces from Bo's coin collection, and God knows what else. The safe in Bo's office has been opened, but I have no idea what he keeps in there."
"Have you called the cops?"
"No-o-o," she said slowly, picking the pale pink polish off a fingernail. "Bo said to wait until he got home."
There was probably a good reason Bo Beemish didn't want the cops called in, especially if he was sleeping with this girl. I couldn't wait to hear the rest.
"Slow down," I said. I jumped up and went over to the cleaning cart and fetched my clipboard of blank contracts. I turned one over and started making notes, asking Lilah Rose to back up and repeat when it came to the important details.
"When did you last see her?"
Lilah sighed. "Let's see. I guess that'd be Friday—no, Thursday night. We were all at our place at Hilton Head over the weekend, and we got back so late last night I just assumed she was here, asleep."
"I'll need her full name, age, and where she's from," I said. "Also, tell me how you came to bring a Mormon girl from Salt Lake City to Atlanta, Georgia."
"Actually, she told us she was from a little town north of Salt Lake City. Toonigh, she said. I can only tell you what she told us. We checked her references, of course, and the agency highly recommended her, but a lot of good that did."
Her lips set in a tight line. "I should have known better than to get mixed up with somebody in a crazy religious sect. Big Mama, that's Bo's mother, she warned me, but I wouldn't listen.
"But honestly," she continued, "half the women in this neighborhood have hired these girls. Deanna Parish has had two girls who've kept her twins for the past three years. And the Eshelmanns and the Greenbergs have had Mormon nannies too."
"Did you hire Kristee from the same agency they used?"
"Well, no," she said, hesitating. "The agency they use requires that you pay for insurance and provide them with a car and give them two weeks' paid vacation a year. Plus they charge you a fifteen-hundred-dollar placement fee. Bo thought that was outrageous. But Polly Newman, that's the little Mormon girl who works for the Eshelmanns, she gave us the name of this agency back in Salt Lake City. She said it was new, and they weren't as expensive.
"So I called and talked to this woman who runs the place, Ardith something; I have her name in the file. She sounded really sweet. We talked for two hours about the kind of girl I was looking for.
"Two days later," Lilah Rose continued, "Ardith called me back. She said she had the perfect girl for us, Kristee Ewbanks. She sent us a snapshot. I'll have to say she's a cute little old blonde, with legs you'd kill for. So we talked to her on the phone, for about an hour, and we signed a contract and sent her a round-trip ticket to Atlanta. In September, she flew out and came to work for us."
"What can you tell me about her? What do you know about her family back home, previous employers, her friends here, things like that?"
Lilah ran her fingers through her short frosted curls. "Well, some things I could tell you right off the bat, but for the rest, I'll have to get the folder I set up for her," she said. "It's in my desk in the study. I'll get it and be right back."
She ran out of the room, giving me a flash of her tanned thighs and—yes, lace-trimmed spanky pants.
In a minute, Lilah Rose was back, clutching a shiny hot-pink file folder. She sat down and leafed through half a dozen pieces of paper, plucked one out, and slid it across the table to me.
"Here's her contract," Lilah Rose said. "Bo had our attorney look it over, and he said it was all basic stuff."
The form itself was obviously a standard contract for services, the kind you can buy at any office supply or stationery store. At the top, someone had typed in NANNY FINDERS INC. and a Salt Lake City post office box with a telephone number. It specified that for a placement fee of $950, Nanny Finders would provide DuBose and Lilah Rose Beemish with a suitable household helper, namely Kristeena Ewbanks, age nineteen. Said nanny would be paid a weekly salary of $125, plus room and board, and would be given two days off a week.
The rest of the contract looked like boilerplate. The Beemishes had signed on one line, and the owner of the agency, one Ardith Cramer, had signed, as had Kristee Ewbanks.
By the time I finished reading the contract, I knew I was hooked. It would be criminally easy to track this kid down, even if she had taken off to Utah. I had an address for the employment agency, a snapshot of the girl, and probably a clear trail of silver, jewelry and coins, if she tried to sell anything. All I'd need to do would be to get one of my buddies at the police department to do a little computer time for me, and I should be home free. With a nice piece of change, especially if I upped my usual fee of $50 an hour to $65, plus expenses.
Besides, I told myself, I'd be doing a favor for an old sorority sister.
"What else have you got there?" I asked, handing back the contract.
Lilah gave me the entire folder. It wasn't much. There were two letters of reference, one from her high school principal, who said Kristee was a bright girl, dependable, of high moral fiber, and another from a woman for whom Kristee had babysat after school and during summers. There was a postcard from Kristee, with a picture of the seagull monument in Salt Lake City, telling the Beemishes how much she was looking forward to becoming a part of their family, and there was a travel agency voucher for a round-trip Delta airlines ticket between Salt Lake City and Atlanta.
"This is it?" I asked, looking up sharply. "No social security number, tax records, letters from the nanny agency? How about correspondence with her family? And where's the snapshot the agency sent you?"
Lilah Rose looked sheepish. "I gave the snapshot to the kids, so they would know what their new nanny looked like. To tell you the truth, I haven't seen it since. As for the other stuff, I never asked her for a social security number. She didn't want us to withhold taxes; she said the Mormons are against using taxes to buy weapons of war. And Bo said that was fine with him, he didn't need any more paperwork in his life."
A small buzzer went off in my head. I wasn't positive, but I felt pretty sure that the Mormons, whizzes at business matters, weren't the ones who refused to pay income taxes.
"Family?" I prodded.
It was clear that I was starting to get on Lilah's nerves. She picked at that pesky fingernail a few seconds before answering.
"She told us she was the baby of a big family—four brothers, all much older than she was. Said her mama had been dead four years, and last year her daddy up and married a girl who was only a couple years older than Kristee. The daddy and the stepmama were starting a new family, and Kristee didn't want to stick around."
"What about phone calls back home?"
She shook her head. "Not to her family, at least not as far as I know. But she did talk to that Ardith woman, I think, every once in a while. I could check the old phone bills, if that would help any."
I nodded. "What about friends? Did she socialize much in Atlanta? Do you know if she had a boyfriend?"
Here, Lilah perked up. "She had every Wednesday night off but she went out a lot of other nights too, because she said she had to go to youth group at the Mormon church. A stake, I think she used to call it. And I know for a fact she'd started dating somebody." Her face darkened. "Just between us, I was relieved when she said she had a boyfriend. I thought maybe she'd give up on Bo then. And I do think they stopped sleeping together, although I don't know if he was the reason why."
For the first time, I felt a pang for the new, rich Lilah Rose Beemish. I also wondered why she thought they had stopped sleeping together, but I refrained from asking. "Did she ever mention the boyfriend's name?"
L
ilah scrunched up her face, deep in thought. "I think she said his name was Whit, or something like that, and he worked at some accounting firm here in town. She said she met him at church. But she had a girlfriend who works for another family in the neighborhood, Patti Jo Nemeyer. I'll get her phone number for you. She could probably tell you more about who Kristee's friends were."
Before I could pump her for any more information, a deep booming voice rang out from the front of the house. "Lilah Rose, where are you?"
Lilah Rose jumped out of her chair, stubbed out her cigarette, and quickly rinsed the ashtray in the sink. "Lord, there's Bo. Look, Callahan, could you stay here for a few minutes, just till I explain what's going on to him? I don't know how he's going to feel about my hiring a private detective.
"And whatever you do, don't tell Bo I told you they were sleeping together, will you? He thinks I don't know, and I want him to go on thinking that way. I'll tell you one thing—I don't intend to let a nineteen-year-old nympho Mormon break up my marriage. At least, not yet."
She skittered out of the room before I could answer. I heard soft voices in the hall, then the sound of a door shutting.
Alone again, I looked around the kitchen. If I was going to get the cleaning finished before the Beemish kids reached puberty, I'd have to get started. I got a cleaning rag out of the supply cart. Even if Bo Beemish wouldn't agree to retain me to find the missing nanny, I'd still have the $175 that House Mouse planned to soak them for cleaning this mausoleum.
4
I WAS SITTING ON THE FLOOR, legs tucked under me Indian style, scraping away at some bright pink goo that appeared to be bubblegum stuck onto one of the lower kitchen cabinets, when I heard a deep male voice clearing itself. Without getting up, I swiveled around to face DuBose Beemish, who stood in the kitchen doorway, arms folded over his chest, surveying me as though I were part of the custom cabinetry.
Every Crooked Nanny Page 2
