Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 07 - Mad as the Dickens

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  David stepped forward. “Deputy Pope, I believe you know my brother Jake and my wife Florence.”

  Mark nodded in acknowledgment. “I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you,” he said.

  The two men stiffened and Florence gasped. I’ve known other women to gasp for effect, but with her it sounded genuine.

  “Is Daddy …?” Jake couldn’t finish the question.

  Mark nodded.

  “Was it his heart?” David wanted to know. “Chief Norton said something about an accident, but my father does have a bad heart.”

  Mark hesitated, then said, “I’m not sure. Once the medical examiner gets here, I may be able to tell you more.”

  “Can I see him?” Jake asked.

  “Not yet, but I’ll tell you when you can. If y’all will excuse me, I need to notify the proper authorities.” Closing the hall door quietly but firmly, he went back toward Seth’s body.

  Though we should have given them some privacy, I don’t think anybody could resist watching the Murdstones. Florence grabbed hold of David, who was staring straight ahead, then reached out and pulled Jake into the embrace, too. Jake started to cry, deep sobs that must have hurt him.

  That’s when I turned away, rubbing my tummy again.

  “I guess he broke it to them as best he could,” Aunt Maggie allowed, “but he should have gotten them alone first.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference,” I said.

  “Well, I think—” Aunt Maggie started to say; then she stopped. “I guess you know what you’re talking about.”

  Junior’s father, Chief Andy Norton, had been the one to tell me when my parents were killed in a car accident. I’d been visiting my grandfather Paw, and Chief Norton had asked Paw out onto the porch to tell him, giving Paw a chance to recover before they told me. But it hadn’t really mattered. I’d known from the expression on Chief Norton’s face that something was bad wrong.

  “Sometimes being alone is worse,” said a voice from behind us. It was Tim Topper, who was playing Bob Cratchit, and like me, he had reason to know. His mother had been murdered when he was just a little boy, so Chief Norton had come to visit him, too. Since Tim’s father had been long gone, Tim was left to be raised by his aunt and uncle.

  I looked down at my tummy, feeling the baby’s kicks. Suddenly I was terrified that something would happen to me or Richard before our child could grow up—that some police officer would be wearing that same expression to give that awful news someday.

  Richard somehow knew I was close to tears before I did myself, and he wrapped his arms around me. “It’s okay, Laura,” he murmured.

  “It’s just the damn hormones,” I said angrily. “I didn’t even hardly know Seth.”

  “I know,” Richard said, rubbing my back. “Let’s sit down.” He led me to as quiet a corner as he could find, and made me put my feet up while Aunt Maggie got me one of the bottles of cold water I’d brought to rehearsal.

  Part of me appreciated the attention, while part of me hated the feelings of weakness that pregnancy caused. The rest of me was watching the other people in the auditorium. They were probably starting to realize that Seth Murdstone hadn’t died of a heart attack or from an accident—that he’d been murdered. I couldn’t help thinking that there was a good chance that the murderer was in the room with us.

  Chapter 5

  Though Richard had known a fair amount about Dickens before he decided to direct A Christmas Carol, ever since then he’d been reading exhaustively, and as usual, he’d shared tidbits. That’s how I knew that it’s pretty easy to tell the villains in Dickens’s books. They tend to be grotesque like Fagin, or repellent like Uriah Heep. Unfortunately, real-life murderers don’t always look or act like murderers, but knowing that didn’t stop me from looking over the cast and crew.

  There was Aunt Maggie, of course, but as far as I knew, she’d liked Seth. Lord knows that she would have let us know if she hadn’t, and even then, she would have been more likely to subject him to a tongue-lashing than to a bludgeoning.

  She noticed me looking around and said, “Was it an accident, Laurie Anne?”

  “It doesn’t look like it.”

  She nodded, absorbing it more easily than most people would have. Maybe it was her age, but I’ve always thought that Aunt Maggie must have been born unflappable. “Do you think that somebody here did it?”

  “I don’t know enough to say. I don’t even know these people that well.” There hadn’t been much time to meet everybody yet, and after Richard’s tantrums, I thought some of them had been avoiding me. “Other than the triplets, of course.”

  Nearby were my cousins Ideile, Odelle, and Carlelle Holt. Though they don’t always dress alike, they do it often enough that the rest of the family has gotten used to being confused. That day it was snug blue jeans and matching Christmas-colored sweaters: Ideile in red, Odelle in green, and Carlelle in green and red stripes. Vasti had brought them in to do costumes and makeup for the show, and since they have more clothes and wear more makeup than anybody else I’ve ever met, I thought they’d do a good job.

  “What do you think, Richard?” I asked. “You know everybody.”

  “Only through their parts,” he said.

  Aunt Maggie said, “Y’all are talking like this is Boston. This is Byerly, Laurie Anne. You must know these folks.”

  “I don’t know everybody in Byerly,” I protested. “I haven’t lived here in ten years.” I’d gone up North to go to college and had ended up marrying Richard and staying there. “I only just met Seth.” And I wasn’t going to get a chance to get to know him any better, I thought sadly.

  “You know Big Bill,” Aunt Maggie said, nodding at an older man in a flannel shirt and blue jeans.

  I nodded, though I could hardly believe that he was there. Big Bill Walters owned Walters Mill, which employed a good proportion of the people in Byerly. He also owned the bank, several apartment buildings, and I wasn’t sure how much more of the town. Anything he didn’t own, he ran by means of being head of the city council. I’d never seen him in anything less formal than a sport jacket, and I certainly would never have thought that he owned a pair of blue jeans, let alone would wear them in public.

  I’d been hearing rumors about him and Aunt Maggie, but this was the first chance I’d had to ask her about them. “So are you two—?”

  “We two aren’t anything,” she said emphatically. “He thinks he can make it up to me after trying to sell the mill to a bunch of no-good Yankees. He just happened to be at the flea market when Vasti tricked me into doing props for the show, and when he said he’d be glad to help out, Vasti couldn’t wait to give him a part.”

  Richard said, “He’s playing Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s dead partner.”

  “I hear he only took the part to be around you, Aunt Maggie,” I teased. “It must be—”

  “Don’t say it!” she snapped.

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, no ma’am.”

  She gave me a look. “Anyway, he’s been helping me out with the props.” She glanced back in his direction. “He looks pretty darned good in those blue jeans, don’t you think?”

  I blinked. Though I knew that a person’s sex life didn’t come to a screeching halt at age sixty, I wasn’t sure I was up to hearing my great-aunt critique Big Bill Walters’s tail end.

  Aunt Maggie said, “Did you meet the Murdstone brothers?”

  “Briefly. Vasti introduced us yesterday, but David’s been busy onstage and Jake’s been backstage.”

  Jake was playing the charity collector and building sets. He was in the furniture business with his father, which was why he’d been tapped to make sets. He didn’t look much like his brother or his father. He was much thinner, which made him look taller, and his hair was jet black.

  “Jake must take after their mother,” I said.

  “I don’t remember what she looked like. She died when Jake was just a little thing,” Aunt Maggie said. “You know Jake’s boy Barnaby is th
e reason we’re doing this play.”

  “I thought it was for charity.” Most of Vasti’s endeavors were for charity, though she was usually pretty vague about the actual cause involved. For some people, this would have meant that the work was its own reward. In Vasti’s case, the reward was having a chance to order people around and make a big show.

  “It is for charity. The money is going to the Shriners’ Burn Hospital in memory of Barnaby. He died last month.”

  “There was another fire in Byerly?” I asked. The previous spring there’d been a rash of them. What with the Burnette home place being firebombed and my coming uncomfortably close to burning to death myself, I was a little sensitive on the subject. “Don’t tell me there’s another arsonist at work.”

  “Nothing like that. Barnaby was hurt in an accident, one of those propane space heaters. I hear there were burns all over his body.” She shook her head. “He wasn’t but nine years old.”

  Richard solemnly said, “ ‘When Death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to work the world, and bless it.’ The Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter Forty.”

  “So it’s just the two of them now,” I said. Though I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, I had enough cousins, aunts, uncles, and other relatives that I couldn’t imagine not being surrounded by family.

  “And David’s wife, Florence,” Aunt Maggie said.

  “Scrooge’s girlfriend in the past, and Mrs. Cratchit in the present,” Richard put in.

  The petite blonde was sitting between Jake and David, but her eyes were only for her husband. Most women her age would look silly in pastels, but the fuzzy rose-colored sweater suited her fine. I knew she was tougher than she looked—she was the lawyer who’d helped my cousin Ilene when she was in trouble. “I heard they got married. It must have been quite the shindig, with her family connections and all.”

  Aunt Maggie snorted. “Not hardly! She and David eloped, and the Junior League is still buzzing about it.”

  “Why? Because they didn’t get another chance to dress up?”

  “That and the fact that Florence married beneath herself.” She must have seen the look on my face because she added, “I’m just repeating what they’re saying. This ‘marrying up’ and ‘marrying down’ business is nothing but foolishness.”

  I nodded, though technically I’d “married up” myself. Richard was a full head taller than I was.

  “Florence is one of the few people Vasti didn’t have to drag into this kicking and screaming,” Aunt Maggie said.

  “Since when does anybody need to drag in performers in Byerly?” I didn’t know if all small towns had as many aspiring actors, musicians, singers, and dancers as Byerly did, or if we were just lucky. That didn’t mean that people were good, but they were darned enthusiastic, and there’d never been a show without hotly contested roles.

  “All the usual folks were already working for the competition,” Aunt Maggie said.

  “What competition?”

  “The Byerly Holiday Follies. Since they got going early, they got the cream of the crop. No offense, Richard.”

  “None taken,” he said with a grin.

  “Even Dorcas Walters is going to be in the Follies,” Aunt Maggie added.

  “Really? Who’s in charge of it?” I asked.

  “Sally Hendon.”

  Ouch! Sally Hendon was a distant cousin of mine and Vasti’s, and as far as Vasti was concerned, she wasn’t distant enough. Once she became the county’s leading saleswoman for Mary Kay cosmetics, Sally had set her sights on being the biggest social climber, too. She’d jumped onto any committee that would have her, helped with every charity event that came down the pike, and ingratiated herself with the society columnist in Byerly’s twice-weekly newspaper. Since Vasti used the same techniques, they’d butted heads more than once.

  For Sally to have gotten the jump on Vasti’s theatrical aspirations must have been galling, and I realized now that it was probably Sally’s show that had the high school auditorium booked up. Even worse, Vasti and Sally were both dying to get into the Junior League, and Dorcas Walters was the reigning president. Everybody in town knew Dorcas couldn’t act, sing, or dance, but she still lusted after the spotlight. That Sally had managed to find something for her to do on stage was quite a coup, sure to improve her chances of getting into the coveted organization.

  Aunt Maggie said, “Vasti’s lucky she got Florence. She and David were on their honeymoon when Sally Hendon put out the word that she wanted performers, so her show was already full up when they got back. In fact, Vasti had been thinking of not even doing a show until she heard Florence was available.”

  “Is she that good an actress?” I asked.

  “Excellent,” Richard said. “One of the bright spots in the cast.”

  “You don’t think Vasti picked her for that, do you?” Aunt Maggie asked. “All Vasti cares about is that Florence is the membership secretary of the Junior League.”

  Then Vasti wasn’t completely off her game after all. “Did Vasti choose all the actors by what they can do for her?”

  “Naturally. Not that some of those folks aren’t good, but that’s not why she picked them. You know how she got Florence, and when Florence said she thought her new husband would be interested, Vasti gave him a part, too.”

  I asked, “What about Seth as Scrooge? Was it because he’s Florence’s father-in-law?”

  “That and the fact that the show’s in honor of his grandson. Which is why Jake is in on it. You already know that a bunch of the Norton girls’ kids are playing Tiny Tim and the other little Cratchits.”

  “So Vasti can get Junior and Trey to direct traffic?” I guessed. “Got it in one.”

  “What about Bob Cratchit?” I asked.

  “Tim Topper?” Richard said. “I thought it was quite brave of Vasti to cast a black man as Cratchit next to a white Scrooge, using American racism as an analogy for the British class system.”

  Aunt Maggie looked at him pityingly.

  “It was the barbecue, wasn’t it?” I said. Tim ran Pigwick’s, one of Byerly’s two barbecue houses. “Refreshments for the intermission? Catering for the cast party?”

  Richard said, “You’re serious, aren’t you? Did Vasti even bother to hold auditions?”

  “What for?” Aunt Maggie said.

  “How could Vasti do this to a perfectly good play?” he moaned.

  “What other favors is she after?” I asked Aunt Maggie.

  “See if you can guess.”

  “Oliver Jarndyce is the Spirit of Christmas Past. He’s in real estate, isn’t he? Is Vasti still talking about buying a bigger house because of the baby?”

  Aunt Maggie nodded.

  Sid Honeywell, the plump and usually jolly man playing the Spirit of Christmas Present, had a gas station. “Door prizes from Sid?”

  Aunt Maggie nodded again.

  Pete Fredericks was one of Byerly’s morticians and was all too appropriately cast as the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come. “Do I want to know what she wants from Pete?”

  “Don’t worry. He’s just bringing extra chairs for the show.”

  “That’s a relief.” I had to wonder if he was going to be taking care of Seth Murdstone. “What about Mrs. Gamp? She’s not in the Junior League, is she?”

  “Not hardly. They’d choke on their cucumber sandwiches before they’d let a trucker’s widow in their precious club.”

  “ ‘Be wery careful o’ vidders all your life,’ ” Richard quoted. “Pickwick Papers, Chapter Twenty.”

  Aunt Maggie ignored him. “Besides which, she probably wouldn’t have time. She’s too busy volunteering. At church, and at the schools, and up at the hospital in Hickory. She even volunteered to work on the play without Vasti having to chase her down. Mrs. Gamp does good work, even if she is a mite strange.”

  “What do you mean?” Richard said. “S
he and Mrs. Harris are the only things holding this play together.”

  “Richard,” I said, “have you actually seen Mrs. Harris?”

  “Not yet. Is there something wrong with her?”

  “Not at all—other than the fact that she doesn’t exist. There is no Mrs. Harris—Mrs. Gamp invented her.”

  “Are you serious?”

  I nodded.

  “Is she seeing a professional about that?” he asked.

  Aunt Maggie looked at him as if he were the one with the imaginary friend. “What on earth for? Mrs. Gamp doesn’t bother anybody. Neither does Mrs. Harris.”

  Before we could speculate further, we heard the sound of sirens. I think all of us jumped at the noise, but I wondered if one of us in the room was afraid to know that more police were coming.

  Chapter 6

  Mark ushered a procession of medical and police personnel past us on their way to and from the hallway where Seth still lay. A county officer was stationed at the front door to make sure nobody unauthorized went in or out—and probably to keep an eye on us, too.

  Eventually Junior came out from the hallway, looking as disgusted as I’d ever seen her.

  “Junior?” I said, but she walked past me to where her nieces and nephews were still under Mrs. Gamp’s wing.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Gamp,” she said. “I’ll take over now.”

  Florence said, “Chief Norton, can you tell us anything more?”

  “No, ma’am, I can’t. This is a police investigation and I’m staying out of it.”

  “Don’t be foolish!” Aunt Maggie said. “You are the police around here.”

  “Not this month,” Mark said. He’d followed Junior out the door, and it seemed to me that I heard more than a little satisfaction in his voice as he said, “Chief Norton is off duty until the end of the year. Though I appreciate her help in securing the scene until the appropriate personnel could arrive, she’s now welcome to go about her business as a private citizen.” Actually, the way Mark said it made it sound as if Junior was required to do so.

  Then he turned to the Murdstones and said, “If one of you could come with me, I need a formal identification of the deceased.”