Murder At the Buckstaff Bathhouse

by Serena B. Miller

  So there I was with my coat still on and Holly’s little red suitcase still packed, sitting on a couch, a’holding Mira, and her just a’ sobbing and boo-hooing something awful, the poor little thing.

  I patted and said all the things that a woman says to another woman when things like this happen. Like she’s gonna find someone else who’ll treat her better and she doesn’t deserve this, and that fancy college-teacher husband of hers is nothing but a poop-head. I guess the Lord had known all along that Doreen needed to sit a spell in Little Rock, Arkansas to help Mira get over a broken heart.

  I missed Kentucky something awful, though. There’s so much heart-break in this world it sometimes makes me want to just go crawl into my little house on the river and lock the door behind me.

  I finally got Mira dried up, and I made us some nice rice pudding, which was her favorite when she was a little girl, although I’m afraid that Mira doesn’t need a whole lot of rice pudding these days. I didn’t say anything while she ate most of the pot, though, alternately licking her spoon and boo-hooing.

  We finally got ready for bed, and boy, was I ready to lay my head on a pillow! Looked to me like that mini-mansion of Mira’s would have plenty of bedrooms to choose from, but Mira had other ideas. She wanted her Aunt Doreen to sleep with her in her big ole King-sized bed even though I warned her that I snored real bad. She said she didn’t care, she was just so tired of being scared and alone.

  It was a shame, though. There must have been five bedrooms in that house, and every last one of them, except for Mira’s, unoccupied. That’s something I don’t understand. Why would anyone need that big of a house unless they have a passel of kids?

  I actually asked Mira that question. She said it was because her husband wanted them to live in the right zip code which didn’t make any sense at all to me. The way I figure it, a zip code is just numbers the post office saw fit to complicate things by making us have to stick them on a letter. It don’t have nothing to do with why you pick a house out.

  While I tried to parse it all out, she said not to worry about it because she was probably going to lose the house anyway.

  I asked why.

  She said it was because the house was under water.

  That confused me. Her shrubs had looked kind of puny to me when we pulled in, and she’d told me they had been having a drought. It took her some explaining before I understood that they had been paying for ten years on this monstrosity of a house and they still owed more on it than they could get if she sold it.

  I know I’m just an old, ignorant, Kentucky woman, but buying ten times more house than you need or can afford just to have the right numbers to write on your envelopes to hand to the postman does not make any sense to me. It made me even more homesick. I love my little two-bedroom house with the yellow kitchen and creaky front porch. Even though whenever it rains too long and the muddy water starts creeping up the river bank fixing to flood, me and my neighbors start worrying about whether our houses might end up underwater for real.

  I patted Mira’s shoulder and told her not to be afraid. That she could always come live with Your’s Truly if she ever needed to. I said that my place might not be fancy, but I could put a roof over her head if she ever needed it. Like I said before, I don’t mind helping a person out, especially if that person is kin.

  I was trying to make her feel better, but all I managed to do was make the poor girl start crying again.

  “Oh, Aunt Doreen,” she sobbed. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so lonely.”

  Then she hugged the breath out of me again. I was glad when she finished crying herself to sleep. I climbed out of bed real easy-like and made myself a nest in the bedroom next door where I could hear her if she called out for me. I ain’t kidding when I say I snore. Shoot, sometimes I get to snoring so loud I scare my own fool self!

  Anyway, the next morning, Mira looked like a train wreck when she woke up, but after she got done applying all the stuff from the pink Mary Kay bottles she had on her dresser, she looked pretty good.

  Then she said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said she wanted to get out of town for the day and go have a spa treatment and she wanted me to go with her and she wanted me to get a spa treatment, too.

  I said I did not want to go.

  She said she knew just the spa to take me to that would make me feel all better.

  I told her I was not the one who had been feeling bad.

  She started crying again.

  Now, I’ve noticed that there’s times when deep grief looks a whole lot like crazy. Mira was grieving that low-down snake of a husband of hers something awful, and it was making her a little crazy in the head. I absolutely did not need to have done to me whatever it is that they do to people in them spas in order to feel better. I felt just fine. I felt like a seventy-one year old woman who didn’t have nothing wrong with her in the first place.

  But when someone you love is hurting that bad, you humor them. You just do. Besides, she said we were only driving an hour away to Hot Springs, Arkansas, which I’d read about in a magazine once and was a little curious about. Plus, I figured she couldn’t cry and drive at the same time. I also hoped that whatever they did in them Hot Spring spas might perk her spirits up.

  So we packed ourselves up into her Pepto-Bismol mini-van and headed out to get ourselves worked on. I just hoped whatever it was she had in mind wouldn’t hurt too bad. I read in one of the them fashion magazines at the beauty shop that some of them fancy places do a procedure called a bikini wax. I’m not entirely sure what’s all involved, but it sounds right painful. I decided right then and there that if anyone comes at me with anything involving hot wax, I’m going to respectfully decline. There are some things a body just shouldn’t have to put up with in the name of beauty. Ain’t likely I’m going to be wearing a bikini any time soon, either.

  Shoot, I’ll tell you a little secret if you promise not to tell nobody. I accidentally bought me some white bikini panties one time. I hadn’t had my glasses checked for a while, and I thought I was getting my regular kind that cover a body up like God intended. It was an accident that I bought them things, but I didn’t want to waste my money and I’d already opened up the little plastic bag they came in, so I couldn’t hardly take them back to the Dollar store.

  I tried to wear them that same morning I opened the package and that was the most miserable Sunday I ever had in my life. Worst thing was, I couldn’t do nothing about it. And it was potluck Sunday. I just had to endure them little bitty things a riding up where they shouldn’t be riding up until the last casserole dish was washed and dried. Then I got myself home and stuffed them things deep into the trash. I didn’t want Horace, who picks up our trash, to see them little panties laying there and start telling people that Doreen had lost her mind and was out trying to find herself a man or something.

  Sometimes, in spite of not wanting to live nowhere else, living in a small town ain’t quite what it’s cracked up to be--especially when you got to worry about what people might say over what you put in the trash.

  Well, I’ve gone and done it again. Lost my train of thought. I know I did not intend to go down that rabbit hole and start talking about my accidental purchase of bikini panties.

  Oh yes—the spa. That’s what I was talking about. When we got to downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, I could surely see why it got that name. Ain’t no mystery there. Everywhere you look there are fountains with steam rising off them. Mira told me that people come from miles around to fill up their empty milk jugs with that hot mineral water, and people used to come and soak and soak in that mineral water. Doctors would even write prescriptions for it. How long to soak, and then how long to spend walking along the promenade walkway they had built special for health purposes. Soak, walk, soak, walk.

  They called it “taking the waters” and only rich people could afford it. Rich people can come up with the darndest ideas. Sounded like a big waste of time to me, but I’m not judging. Maybe
rich people got problems I don’t know nothing about.

  Anyway, Mira said me and her was going to check into the only remaining bathhouse that gave old-fashioned water spa treatments.

  I felt relieved. I’m fine with water—being raised beside of the river and all. In fact, I never feel entirely well when I get too far away from it, although I don’t think anyone in their right mind would think soaking in the Ohio River would make them healthier. Too many chemical plants up and down it. No, I’m just relieved because if the Buckstaff Bathhouse is that old-fashioned, I figure there’s a right good chance no one is going to try to come at me with hot wax.

  Now, seventy-one ain’t really all that old compared to, say, ninety. There’s things I ain’t ever had to do without—like cars and electricity. I’d like to say that stepping into the Buckstaff was like stepping back into time, but it weren’t any time I’d seen in my day. You could tell that this had been one fancy, expensive place in its day.

  First off, everything was marble and tile. Little bitty tile on the floor in fancy shapes and designs. I stood there admiring it in the foyer while Mira made the arrangements at the desk for our spa treatment. Mira said it was a gift from her to me for listening to her caterwaul last night for so long.

  There was some Asian people paying for the water treatment, too, a girl and a young man. We had to wait while they got their English sorted out and everyone understood each other. Then we got on an elevator with a cage-like door that they closed and a girl sitting there on a stool operating it. That was a different experience all in its own self. I’m just barely old enough to remember there being an elevator operator at that fancy Marting’s Department store over the bridge in Portsmouth, Ohio back when I was a kid.

  The girl was real nice as we went up to the second story. It turns out that women had a whole floor to theirselves. The men’s was on the main floor, the women’s on the second, which didn’t seem fair, but I try not to complain unless it’s really important.

  We got up there on the second floor and there was these big, open, echoey spaces everywhere with lots of light. Nothing smelled like chlorine, neither, like it always did over at Portsmouth at the Dreamland pool I used to go to as a kid. Nope. The whole place just smelled like pure water. And everywhere I looked underfoot there’s all these fancy tiles and I think of the hours it must have took to get them fancy tiles placed just right.

  Mira really should have prepared me better for what came next, but she didn’t. The elevator girl took each of us to a little tiny dressing room with two skinny lockers in each of them. There was a white wooden chair to sit on, and a key she showed me how to use and then loop over my wrist with a stretchy, plastic thing.

  “Take off all your clothes. Put them in here. Lock the locker. Then wait for someone to come put a sheet around you,” the elevator girl said and left.

  Now, this put me in a quandary. When she said “take off all your clothes” did she mean ALL my clothes?

  “Mira,” I said through the petition. “Did she mean…”

  “Yes, Aunt Doreen. Underwear, too. You’re going to be getting into a bathtub.”

  So I took off even my skivvies, stuffed everything into the little locker, locked it, looped the key around my wrist, memorized the number 40 that was on the locker, and then sat down on that white painted wooden chair. I was just as naked and goose-bumpy as a raw turkey and I was not happy about it. Then I started wondering how many other bare bottoms had sat on that painted wooden chair, and I stood up real quick again.

  Goodness! The things I get myself into trying to be nice to people! If I’d known listening to Mira boo-hoo last night would cause me to end up like this, I’d have turned around and gotten back on the train.

  Just about the time I got ready to give up and put my clothes back on, some woman came to the curtain and said, “knock knock.”

  Now, all I’m saying is it’s hard to know exactly what to do when all you got on you is goose flesh and some strange woman says “knock knock” into your curtain.

  A need to say “who’s there” came over me, as well as a desire to giggle at all this silliness Mira was putting me through, but I stifled my need to try to be funny and just said, “Come in.”

  “Turn your back to me, honey,” the woman said, without opening the curtain. “And raise your arms.”

  So I did that. Feeling like a dad-blamed fool the whole time. I seen some long, black arms whip a sheet around me quick as could be, and then the woman flipped the edges over my shoulders in what she called “a toga.”

  “Now turn around and follow me,” she said, in a real kind voice. “My name is LaToya and I’ll be taking care of you today.”

  LaToya was about my height, had pretty, braided hair, and a real nice smile on her face. She must have seen the look of I’m-not-so-sure-about-this on mine because she tried to reassure me. “It’s going to feel real good. I promise.”

  Next thing I knowed, she’s taken me to another little cubicle with a big, white, claw-footed bathtub big enough for three people to sit in. Seems like overkill for just me. It was filled with water and there was a little footstool for me to step up into it. I tried to take my sheet in with me, but she pulled it away and there I was, climbing into a bathtub as stark naked as a two-year-old getting a bath by its mother.

  I stepped into the mineral water and almost stepped right back out again. It was almost—but not quite—scalding hot. I kinda danced around some before I decided I could stand it to sit down, but it weren’t easy. LaToya had me sink down into it and stretch out until my toes were touching the bottom of the bathtub underneath the faucet, and she laid some kind of a board behind my back to relax onto, and she stuck a rolled up towel behind my neck, and then she turned something on that looked like my cousin Benny’s little outboard trolling motor. It started riling up the water something serious.

  “You just relax now,” LaToya said, and closed the curtain to my little cubicle.

  I have a confession to make. I was raised with no bathtub at all. No shower neither. We washed ourselves in the river most weeks. In the winter I was raised taking a once-a-week all over bath in a tin tub in the same water Janice and Ralph had theirs.

  When a person grows up without a bathtub, you never really get over the luxury of having one and I finally let myself relax and just luxuriated like I knew Mira and LaToya was wanting me to.

  That water felt so good a bubbling away. Kinda made everything I’d been through the past weeks drain on out of my body.

  I was just about to doze off when LaToya says, “Knock Knock” again and brought me in two little plastic cups of mineral water. “Just sip it” she said. “It’s warm.”

  Well, I started to sip it and was shocked that it was as hot as the bathwater.

  “It comes straight out of the ground like that,” she explained. “It’s just mineral water and real good for you.”

  So I sipped down two plastic glasses of water so hot you could of stuck a Lipton tea bag in it and made tea. Then LaToya left me alone again and I sunk down deep into the water and for the next twenty minutes I felt like I was one of them rich women who used to come and spend weeks here.

  “Knock Knock,” LaToya said, from outside the curtain. “Bathtub time is up.”

  I hated to leave that big old bathtub, but she was right. It was time. The heat had already made my legs a little wobbly. LaToya helped me out, wrapped me back into my sheet, and we went marching off to what she called a sitz bath. By this time, I had lost all track of Mira and I was beginning to lose track of time, too. I was starting to warm up to just doing whatever I was told because everything I was being told to do was feeling awfully good.

  Then LaToya had me put my shiny-hiney right smack down in a porcelain seat full of hot water. She leaned me back, stuck my feet on a towel-covered footstool, and draped me with that sheet again. This, she told me, was supposed to limber up my lower back. She forgot to whip the curtain closed this time and for a few minutes, I had a view and
could see what all was going on around me.

  There was one young woman lying quietly on a blue, cushioned, table who was kinda interesting. I knew I had seen her before. She was the small, Asian girl who had been signing in ahead of me and Mira when we came through the front door. It surprised me that she had chosen to wear a purple bathing suit underneath her sheet. I had no idea a bathing suit was allowed in this place. This one weren’t no two piece either. It was a one-piece with a skirt.

  “Oops!” LaToya walked by and whipped the curtain shut. “Sorry about that.”

  Once again, I was enclosed in my little cubicle, which was fine with me. I hadn’t gotten all that much privacy at Ralph and Carla’s. I liked the feeling of being in this little cocoon.

  I hate to admit it now, but I spent just a little time feeling superior to the Asian girl because I had started feeling like an old hand at that sheet business. I was enjoying the whole process and didn’t need the prop of a purple bathing suit to feel comfortable.

  LaToya came back in about ten minutes about the time my lower back started feeling all loosey-goosey. Then I got the mummy treatment over where the Asian girl had been a few minutes earlier. Hot, wet towels were wrapped around my feet and legs and behind my back and neck, and then LaToya put a nice cold towel over my forehead, and handed me two glasses of iced mineral water to drink.

  After I’d downed all that water, she laid me back and covered me up with that sheet again.

  “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said.

  Okay, I admit it. I fell asleep and didn’t know nothing at all until she woke me up and broke the bad news that the steam cabinets were not working. I took a look at the metal, closet-looking things with a hole for a person’s head to poke through and decided that I was fine with the fact that they were broke.

  She took me to this needle shower, which shot at me from all directions from the top of my head to my knees for two minutes. It was like being in a waterfall and I could hardly get my breath. Then LaToya dried me off, wrapped that sheet around me one more time—it was starting to get a little wrinkled and draggy by now--and left me sitting in the room where I’d get a massage.