by Sharon Short
Then I headed back out.
Yes, I looked around for Owen’s car.
But Owen and the purportedly poisoned pies were long gone.
So what? I told myself. I don’t care, I told myself. Right.
Then I walked to the town’s government building, ten blocks down, which included the police department and a two-cell jail. My plan was just to see Chief Worthy, or leave a message for him, about Slinky’s maybe being poisoned by one of the contest pies.
I hadn’t expected to end up in the jail. Now that I was here, though, I wished I’d taken an antacid during my brief stop in my apartment.
And maybe even brought some air freshener with me.
Uncle Otis, as it turned out, could ripen a jail cell faster than a cornered skunk.
I tried not to gasp and gag as I listened to his rant. I’m not sure he’d have noticed, but just in case, I was trying to be polite.
“There’s documented evidence—documented, I tell you—that Daniel Boone his-self traded American ginseng he harvested from this very area!” Uncle Otis was saying. “See—it was free commerce then, jus’ like it oughta be free commerce now! I’m not poachin’! I’m upholdin’ a great American tradition! If it was good enough for Daniel Boone,”—on the “boo” part of the name, Uncle Otis’s voice cracked, then rose another notch—”then it’s good enough for me now!”
“Uncle Otis, I don’t think it was considered poaching then.”
He stuck out his stubbly chin. “Ain’t poaching. It’s harvesting. Same now as then.”
“The Ohio Department of Natural Resources doesn’t see it that way, Uncle Otis. You were gathering ginseng from state-owned forest! Outside of the ginseng season—whatever that is—according to Diana.”
Diana Carol was the dispatcher on duty. I’d asked her if Chief Worthy was in and Diana told me no, Chief Worthy was gone for the evening and could she take a message or could I talk to someone else? I’d just about finished writing out a brief note to Chief Worthy when Diana told me, oh, by the way, Josie, your Uncle Otis was hauled in late this afternoon for ginseng poaching.
I finished the note and gave it to Diana to give to Chief Worthy while Diana filled me in on what she knew, then sent me back to see Uncle Otis.
Now, Uncle Otis was going on, “Who is man to judge a season? So the law says ginseng season doesn’t start until the fall? Does the law set the seasons of heaven and earth? This, I tell you, was ripe and ready ginseng.”
“Not according to the law,” I said, grinding out each word through clenched teeth. He was lucky bars separated us. “Uncle Otis, you’re in real trouble here. Now tell me, why’d you harvest all this ginseng?”
Uncle Otis glared at me. “I had a ready and willing customer, that’s why. And I worked hard to harvest it, too. Isn’t a man’s labor worth anything anymore? Three whole days, without ceasing, I tell you!”
And without bathing or changing clothes or helping Sally like he was supposed to. So this was his get-rich-quick scheme. And I could see he’d been working hard at it. His coveralls and T-shirt were filthy, as were his bare forearms and hands, his nails black with earth. His work boots were mud caked. Even his Masonville Farm Implements ball cap was filthy, and Uncle Otis is usually very particular about the neatness of his ball cap collection.
“Uncle Otis, I can tell you’ve been working hard,” I said. “But you can’t fight this. Now, you’re gonna have to tell why you’ve been poaching—”
“Harvesting!”
“Okay, Okay, harvesting ginseng, and who you’re selling it to, and where you’ve stashed it, or you’re gonna be in a world of hurt. ‘Fess up about who’s in on this with you, then the law’ll go lighter on you. If you don’t, you’re gonna be in trouble all by yourself.”
Uncle Otis sat heavily down on the cot, which sagged and creaked. He slumped forward, resting his elbows on his knees, staring down at the cement floor.
“I can’t do that, Josie,” he said. His voice was suddenly quiet.
“Uncle Otis, you’re going to have to. Now, I know you weren’t just out there gathering ginseng for fun. There had to be a payoff for you, and that means someone else was involved. Was this the reason you quit working on the Paradise Theatre?”
Uncle Otis didn’t say anything.
“Uncle Otis, were you in on something with Alan Breitenstrater?”
He sucked in sharply, looked up at me, clearly struck by my question.
“Did anyone tell you about the pie-eating contest at the Breitenstrater Pie Company today?”
He shook his head slowly. “I knew it was going on—who doesn’t, around here,” he said. “But like I said, I’ve been working out in the forest the past three days. Harvesting.”
He put a lot of emphasis on that last word.
“Alan Breitenstrater announced that his company was going to launch a new line of health-food pies—starting with the lemon ginseng flavor,” I said.
Uncle Otis’s bushy eyebrows rose.
“Then, since Cletus Breitenstrater is apparently missing—” I paused, but Uncle Otis didn’t react to that. “—Alan announced he’d take his place in the eating contest, but instead of using the traditional chocolate cream pie, he’d use a lemon ginseng pie.
“And after he’d eaten a few bites, he keeled over. Face-forward in the pie.”
Uncle Otis’s face, at least in the few dirt-free streaks I could make out, was blanching.
“Dead, Uncle Otis. Supposedly from a heart attack.” I paused. Uncle Otis moaned. “But I have reason to believe the pie was poisoned.”
Poor Uncle Otis dropped his face to his hands and started sobbing.
“Uncle Otis,” I said, “just what do you know about this? Are you caught up in something with the Breitenstraters?”
But Uncle Otis just shook his head as his shoulders quaked from his sobs. “I thought my plan would work this time! I was going to get some money, help out Sally . . .”
“You can help yourself and Sally best by telling me, or better yet, the authorities, just what you’re mixed up in.”
Uncle Otis looked up at me. Tears had striped the dirt on his face. If he weren’t so pitiful, he’d have looked comical.
“I can’t tell you that, Josie,” Uncle Otis said, shaking his head. “That’s the one thing I can’t tell you, and no one else, either.”
“But why?”
Uncle Otis just moaned, and put his head back to his hands.
I sighed. For pity’s sake, just why do people think they can hide the truth and not have it come out in the end? It’s like I said before. A secret is like a poorly treated stain. The truth’ll come out sooner or later, and when it does, setting things right will be even harder.
But no one ever likes to believe that. Not Owen. Not Uncle Otis. And not the Breitenstraters, with all their fancy announcements about secret plans.
I took my time walking from the jail to the Paradise Theatre, taking in each shop as I passed it, smiling and nodding and “how y’all doing” whenever I passed anyone.
Not that there was a lot happening on a Sunday evening past seven o’clock in downtown Paradise. Most of the shops hadn’t opened at all that day, and the few that had had closed by five o’clock.
But some folks were out, mostly folks who lived a few blocks away from the business district, in the Cape Cod-style houses or hundred-plus-year-old two-story houses on Plum Street or Birch Drive or Maple Avenue. If I chose to stroll down those streets, I’d see many a person out on the front porch, sweating out the evening heat with tall glasses of lemonade or sweet iced tea.
Anyway, the ritual of greeting some of the folks I’ve known all my life at least took the edge off my anger at Owen and my frustration with Uncle Otis.
On Main Street I saw and talked with a few fellow Paradisites. Wendy Gettlehorn was out with her husband, Danny, (who’s a guard over at the state prison,) and their five kids—one in Danny’s arms, one in a wagon being pulled by another kid, one on a tricycle, a
nd another on a pogo stick. As they bounced and swirled around us, Wendy told me in a hush-hush voice that she’d heard there wouldn’t be a parade since Alan had passed away because it wouldn’t be fitting so soon after his death. Then she told me she was sorry to hear about Uncle Otis.
The Gettlehorns walked, bounced, and rolled on and I saw Mayor Cornelia Hintermeister out walking her toy poodle, Peaches. Cornelia said of course there would be a parade (I didn’t mention Wendy as my source of the rumor); it would just have to be handled tastefully and she was busy forming a committee on that. (Actually, she was busy trying to control Peaches, who was running around far more wildly than the Gettlehorn kids.) Of course, she told me meaningfully, she also expected that there would be a play, too, in the newly refinished Paradise Theatre. Then she told me she was so-o-o sorry to hear about Uncle Otis.
After that I saw Pastor Roy Whitlock, and his wife Purdy, from the Baptist Church. They told me that they’d heard that Alan Breitenstrater hadn’t really died from a heart attack. (That one got my attention. Was I not the only one who suspected pie poisoning?) Instead, they heard, he hadn’t died at all, but had faked his death for some dark reason that no one had figured out yet. Given the use of the defibrillator on him, this seemed about as likely as Elvis showing up over at the Quick Stop on the edge of town, but I just smiled and nodded at the Whitlocks. Then they told me they were sorry to hear about Uncle Otis but that they’d put his name on the prayer chain.
For that, I sincerely thanked them. Uncle Otis was going to need all the prayers he could get
In between these little visits, I glanced at the shops on Main Street—mostly second-hand shops like Trash to Treasure or antique shops like Rayanne’s Relics, with a few other stores in between—Cherry’s Chat N Curl, Leftover Electronics (refabbed toasters and waffle makers and radios) Book Worm Heaven (a second-hand book shop, which has hanging over its door a wood-cut, hand-painted logo I particularly admire: a haloed, grinning worm popping out from behind a book), and Bob’s Bait-Supplies (which I reckon has real worms), to name a few. There were a few empty places, too, where the hardware store and a jewelry shop and a pharmacy used to be.
Chatting with these folks and looking at the shops and taking in the dusky night made me feel protective toward Paradise—at the same time that I felt a deep uneasiness about where we were heading.
For one thing, the Breitenstrater Pie Company was an important employer for the town. What would happen now that Alan was gone? Cletus—when and if he showed up again—surely wasn’t up to running the business. We’d probably end up with firecracker pies, for pity’s sake. And somehow, I couldn’t imagine Dinky doing a much better job.
And, too, despite Cornelia’s assurances to me that the parade would go on, and my assurances to her that the play would go on, the whole Founder’s Day celebration . . . including the fireworks display that meant so much to my dear cousin Guy . . . was in jeopardy without the Breitenstraters underwriting it.
Maybe that sounds trivial, compared to someone’s death, but a town like Paradise only has a few things on which to hang its pride. The Founder’s Day celebration and the future of the Breitenstrater Pie Company were important to our town.
If my suspicion about the true cause of Alan’s death was correct, then murder was making a mess in neat-as-a-pie Paradise . . . and from my visit at the jail, it appeared that somehow or another my Uncle Otis was right in the middle of it.
Which meant it was up to me to try to set things right.
And I didn’t have a clue as to how to do it.
Mrs. Oglevee, of course, had an idea.
“Stay out of it, Josie,” she snapped at me.
I rolled over, moaning. What time was it, anyway? Of course, I couldn’t check, because, as usual Mrs. Oglevee was visiting me in a dream when I most needed sleep. My back and shoulders were aching. I’d spent three hours working with Sally, who said yes she knew that her dad was in jail—he’d used his phone call on her—and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She couldn’t afford an attorney and she didn’t know any more than I did. After that, we worked in silence.
I came home, listened to Owen’s message that he’d shipped off the pies—he didn’t say anything more than that—showered, put on my favorite, comfy Tweety-Bird nightshirt and nice clean thick white socks, had a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich while catching a Mary Tyler Moore rerun on the TV Land cable channel, brushed my teeth, then crawled into bed.
I thought, briefly, how lovely it would be to have Owen around to massage my shoulders—then pushed the thought away. It wouldn’t do my heart any good to let my thoughts wander beyond that. Then I drifted off to blessed, sweet sleep . . . where I stayed until Mrs. Oglevee showed up.
She was wearing a pink blouse—just like Mrs. Beavy’s, with a reddish stain right over her left breast—just like Mrs. Beavy’s. Mrs. Oglevee, however, was also wearing some definitely non-Mrs.-Beavy-style clothing—a long, black velvet skirt slit up the side, high heeled silver sandals, and a gold-and-diamond tiara that was askew in her cap of tightly permed silver hair. (Mrs. Oglevee made her semiannual visit to Cherry’s Chat N Curl just two days before she died.)
Mrs. Oglevee was also behaving in a very non-Mrs. Beavy style—leaning casually back against a vaguely bar-shaped cloud, while sipping from a glass of red wine, and looking awfully worn out for someone who had been in her eternal heavenly rest for ten years.
I sighed. “What do you want?”
“Like I said, stay out of it,” Mrs. Oglevee snapped, then took a long sip of wine that should have drained the glass. The glass, however, stayed full. An afterlife benefit, I supposed.
Mrs. Oglevee hiccupped.
I arched my left eyebrow, an expression that had mightily annoyed the earthly Mrs. Oglevee when she’d tried to teach me history in junior high. “Looks to me like you need to stay out of it.”
She waggled the wine glass at me like a pointer, and more wine sloshed out, right onto the reddish stain on her blouse. But Mrs. Oglevee didn’t seem to notice. “You mind your own business, Josie. Just stay out of mine—and everyone else’s.”
“That’s what you came to tell me? To mind my own business?”
Mrs. Oglevee rolled her eyes. “/ didn’t come to you. I was having a perfectly good time . . . well, never mind that. You called me.”
That’s what she says every time I wonder why she’s disturbing my sleep.
“Well, I don’t know why I’d do that,” I said. “I’ve been working hard. And I’m tired, and—”
“You called me because you always were too easily confused—and you need me to straighten you out. Mind your own business!”
“You mean, you’re upset because I suspect Alan Breitenstrater didn’t just die of a heart attack?”
“You’re going to make a big mess, if you start digging into things that aren’t any of your business!”
“Aw, you’re worried about me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Oglevee snapped. “You just need to leave well enough alone. The history of Paradise doesn’t need exploring. It is exactly what I taught you and all those other snot-nosed kids. It is exactly what has been presented in the Founder’s Day play—”
“—which Cletus rewrote based on something new he discovered. And now Alan is dead. And Cletus has disappeared.”
“My point exactly.”
”Ah, so you admit Cletus must have found out something for his play and that fits somehow in this whole mess.”
Mrs. Oglevee looked confused, stared into her wine glass as if that were her source of confusion, which—for all I really know about the hereafter—maybe it was.
She took another sip, then frowned at me. “I never said that. I just said don’t mess with truth as everyone has always understood it. Just let it be. I would think you’d have learned something from your experience with Owen. You had a good relationship going, then he said one innocent little thing, and instead of letting it pass, you had to keep picking a
t it, and now look.”
“Now I know my boyfriend is a divorce, a dad, and guilty of manslaughter.”
Mrs. Oglevee smiled at me. “And that makes you happy? See?”
Well, duh, I wanted to say. Of course knowing that did not make me happy. And what really made me angry was that Owen had hidden the truth from me.
But I can’t bring myself to sass an old school teacher—not even a dead one who only shows up in my dreams.
So instead I thought through what Mrs. Oglevee was trying to tell me. “What you’re saying is that, if I keep digging for whatever’s really going on with the Breitenstraters,” I said slowly, “I’ll find out some ugly truth about Paradise, just as I did about Owen’s past.”
“Yes! Now you get it! You are teachable, after all!” Mrs. Oglevee exclaimed. Then she looked horror-struck. “I mean, um, no, no . . . oh, I don’t know! Just leave things be, Josie!”
“Sounds as if you know something you’re not telling me.”
She glared at me, but didn’t say anything.
“Just like my Uncle Otis,” I added, knowing that would rile her.
“I’m nothing like your Uncle Otis!” she snapped, then took a long drink.
“So you do know something about Paradise’s real history?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said, singsong style. Did I mention her wine glass kept refilling itself? And that she taught junior high for about ten years too many?
My turn to smile. “I intend to.”
Mrs. Oglevee suddenly looked horrified and frazzled. “No, no, I just—Josie Toadfern, you—you—you—”
And with that final sputter, she disappeared, just like that. I never even got to thank her for her hint about what had really stained Mrs. Beavy’s blouse.
11
There’s more than one way to clean up a stain.
And there’s more than one way to get to the bottom of a murder.
