Wedding Bell Blues

by Ruth Moose

  I pulled back the sheet and saw a body. Male. Nude. Butch Rigsbee. Or the dead body of Butch Rigsbee. He was so stark white, his hair looked even blacker. A shock of black hair and a cadaver’s smile pulling back from his still sparkling teeth. “Ohhhhhh,” I said.

  The smell of Old Spice shaving lotion in that room was strong enough to knock me down. Somebody must have emptied a whole bottle in here. I pinched shut my nose, held my breath and turned to leave. To call Ossie. To get out of here before I screamed or threw up or both.

  “Don’t move,” a voice behind me said. Allison?

  I had not heard the bulldozer stop, but it must have. I felt her behind me. “He’s dead,” I said. She started to cry. I felt her crumple, heave deep sobs. Then more sobs. “I know,” I said, turned around and held her, let her cry all over me.

  “He was not coming back.” She finally sniffled.

  Well, I could have told her that.

  “From Florida.” She swallowed a big sob with a wet gulp. “This time. He had a floozy, been seeing her all along.” Allison cried more. “They were going to Cuba to live.”

  “You killed him?” I said.

  “I had to. He said he was leaving me. All these years. After all I did for him.” She screamed now, leaned over and began to pound both fists on Butch’s body. “He said he loved her. Loved her! Not me.”

  I slipped out of the room to call Ossie DelGardo. This time I told him matter-of-factly what had happened, that I was standing next to the room where there was the very dead body of Butch Rigsbee.

  I started to close the door, but not before I saw that Allison had crawled into bed and lay there holding Butch Rigsbee’s body, sobbing, sobbing like her heart would break.

  My next phone call was to Pastor Pittman. I told him to come to Motel 3. That Allison had killed her lover and would need to talk to someone. Pittman is usually a good listener and probably had a lot of counseling bones in his background.

  Then I waited for Ossie. This time he would believe me. I had the body to prove it.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Ida Plum is a good listener, too, and this time she didn’t scold me for putting my nose in where it didn’t belong. She did say she hoped things in Littleboro would calm down after this. That she could do with a little bit of normal for a change.

  I thought, So could I. Some everyday, run-of-the-mill ordinary.

  But first we had a wedding to cook for. And I was still seething inside when I thought about Miles Fortune and his camera, how he was going to show L.A. all these local yokels.

  A kitchen is a good place for therapy. You can get out a lot of frustration, anger and, yes, even grief in a kitchen.

  You can beat, chop, sear, broil, whip, scald and more.

  When I’m upset I beat up a great cake batter, the fluffier the better, and I bake, bake, bake. I bake breads, rolls, muffins. I steam and sweat and wear down all the worst feelings. The nerve of that man Miles Fortune, poking around to reveal the decaying underbelly of the South. And here’s Scott, hammer and nails, paintbrush and ladders, trying to put things back together again. War, I thought. Like me and Ossie. Opposite sides. He sees the ugly, the crime, the un-doers, and me, I see the trying-to-do, fix up, clean up, paint up, do up. Make it better. I’m the polished cotton print in the tearoom; Ossie is the dark shadow on winter’s eve.

  And here I was baking a wedding cake for him. Ordered by Juanita. Seven layers. Plus the groom’s cake in the shape of a police badge, Juanita’s idea. So I did the sheet cake first, carved it in the shape of a badge, put it in the freezer to ice later, to have ready for the rehearsal dinner the night before the big “I do.” I was not hosting the rehearsal dinner. The bridal party was going to some fancy digs in Pinehurst. All I had to do was make the groom’s cake for that one. The Dixie Dew would hold the reception in the back garden after Pastor Pittman did the service in the gazebo, which was now only the gazebo in progress.

  Occasionally I looked out to see if something, anything was rising in the garden. All I saw so far was stacks of lumber and no trace of Scott. I was reminded of my first days trying to fix up the Dixie Dew when the contractor Verna had recommended ordered materials and more materials and didn’t show up to do anything with them. Just ran up my bill at Lowe’s and elsewhere. That’s when I got lucky and Scott came into my life. Maybe even saved my life, as well as my living, and pried me loose from the clutches of Ossie DelGardo more than once.

  I mixed icing by the gallon, listened to a radio talk show on NPR, Frank Stasio’s The State of Things. Radio and newspapers keep me going. I trust them, believe in them, don’t need experts who are not experts pontificating on themselves. World news from the BBC I can handle; I don’t need the shock pictures. And I love music, bluegrass to classical, one to get my feet going, the other to soothe my soul.

  Ida Plum had left to get her hair done but promised she’d come back and help clean the kitchen. “And fill me in on the latest news,” I had called, as she got her purse off the hook in the pantry.

  When Ida Plum got back, smelling strongly of perfumed hair “hold it” varnish, she announced, “The latest is that Lesley Lynn Leaford is back in town.”

  “What?” I stopped Mama Alice’s trusty old KitchenAid mixer midswirl. This was news indeed. “I thought she died.”

  “No. It was her daddy who died.”

  I scraped the sides of the mixing bowl.

  “Not only back in town,” Ida Plum thumped one of my already baked layers onto a dish towel, “but.”

  “Skinny and worth a million dollars?”

  “Two of the two.” She put the cake pans in the sink.

  “So, which one first?” Ida Plum loved to make me pull details out of her. She could be as bad as Verna, drawing out a good story.

  “The million dollars.” Ida Plum stacked bowls and stuff in the dishwasher.

  “Daddy?” I asked.

  “None other. Left her beaucoup of the stuff.” She pronounced the French “boo coos.”

  “Who’da thunk it?” I made icing rosettes, which I thought too much with the scrolls and swags, but whatever Juanita wanted Juanita was going to get. Maybe marriage would sweeten up Ossie. It couldn’t go the reverse.

  “Not only money. Tina Marie told me she almost didn’t recognize Lesley Lynn.”

  “Well my, my,” I said. “Like how?”

  “How what?”

  “She didn’t recognize her how?”

  “Seems not only had she lost a couple tons of weight, but had found some world-class plastic surgeon and availed herself of his or her services.”

  “My, my,” I said again. Our own Lesley Lynn Leaford. “So that could have been her car I saw at the fairgrounds in Clyde Edgemont’s display. It would be a classic.” Then a sudden thought dived into my mind. Could Lesley Lynn have been in the parade after all? Could she have been in the mysterious dark limo? I couldn’t imagine her missing a Littleboro parade, Thunderbird or not.

  Things did change in Littleboro. And people. Some came back, like me. Wounded and limping but we crawled back.

  “Where is Lesley Lynn staying?” I asked above the roar of the mixer. I was out of icing. Somehow I couldn’t see her in the other completed room at Motel 3, if the other room was actually rentable.

  “I didn’t find that out,” Ida Plum said. “Tina Marie had finished my hair.” Ida Plum hung her apron on the same pantry nail my grandmother used. I had a sudden small memory flash of nostalgia. “Reba was there,” Ida Plum said. “Sitting on the floor, painting her nails some god-awful color I can’t even describe. Tina Marie had given her outdated nail polish to keep her entertained.”

  So Ossie hadn’t hauled her in. “How did she seem?”

  “Like Reba usually seems,” Ida Plum said. “In her own world. Why?”

  “No reason,” I said. “No reason at all.” Except that I did feel good knowing Ossie didn’t have his mind set on arresting Reba, locking her up for killing the Swaringen fellow. And now we kne
w Allison had killed Butch, it was up to Ossie to find out the how and take care of the rest of the business of bringing a killer to justice. Which was Allison. Why did I feel so sorry for her? Love never makes sense. Ask anybody, that’s what Ida Plum would say. Cupid’s arrows go in many directions.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I was out of powdered sugar, not an uncommon occurrence in this house. I couldn’t count the times Mama Alice had sent me to M.&G.’s for a box or three of XXXX sugar. I sometimes thought it was like magic dust. She wore it. The kitchen wore it. You could swipe your finger across kitchen counters or canisters and taste sweetness.

  So it turned out that I got filled in on the rest of the story at M.&G.’s Grocery. Here I was over in the baking aisle with Mrs. Pastor Pittman, the Barbie blond stick of a preacher’s wife. She tried to hide a box of cake mix, lemon supreme, behind her back but not before I saw it. She wore a lime-green dress with matching shoes. Every time I’d ever seen her, she was in a dress and her shoes always matched. Did she not own a pantsuit or jeans? Were preachers’ wives not allowed to wear such things? I thought they must lead a life under a magnifying glass. Yikes.

  “You heard about our Lesley Lynn Leaford?” She patted her perfect blond shell of a pageboy. Not a hair out of place.

  “Yes,” I said. “It sounds wonderful.”

  “She’s staying with us. I keep our guest room always at the ready. You never know.” She laughed a little glass chime of a laugh. “Pastor did the services for her father,” Mrs. Pittman went on.

  I tried to think of Mrs. Pittman’s first name. Lynda? Lorie? Lucy? Lydia? Barbie, I decided. Of course. Barbie Pittman.

  “She always kept her membership here, paid her pledges. Even after they moved.”

  Did preachers’ wives know everything? Maybe she was the mysterious Pearl Buttons. Mama Alice had kept me posted on some of the local news while I was away, but how could Lesley Lynn Leaford’s return have been missed by Pearl Buttons and her binoculars?

  “Where had they moved to?”

  “North, up north.” She laughed. “Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Can you imagine? For her treatments. Some facility there. We had a grand time.”

  “We? At the facility?” I loaded my shopping cart with yellow boxes of powdered sugar.

  “No, no, no.” She waved the hand that wasn’t hiding the box of cake mix. “The Red Lion Inn. That’s where we stayed when Pastor did the services in the cemetery down the street. She paid for us to fly up.”

  She called her husband “Pastor”? Didn’t he have a real people name? Oh my, I thought. “Oh my” seemed to be my words for the day.

  “We went to the Norman Rockwell Museum and all that stuff,” Mrs. Pittman continued. “It was such fun.” Who knew Pastor Pittman was such an art lover? “We rented a car, did Walden Pond, Orchard House … he grew up loving Little Women as much as I did.” She sighed. “Nobody reads it anymore.”

  I thought, Well, I did, but I liked Nancy Drew better. She had more spunk and wasn’t always moaning about Marmee and sick little sisters.

  “But Emily’s coming back.”

  Emily? What Emily? She must have seen my puzzled look.

  “Why, Emily Dickinson, of course. Her work has always been read, but now she’s really popular. We whizzed on over to Amherst. Broke my heart.”

  “What?” I asked. “What broke your heart?” Who knew Mrs. Pittman was such a reader of poetry? So much I didn’t know. Some people kept lovely secrets or maybe I had just never taken the time and energy to get to know them.

  “Her grave, of course. It’s behind a shopping center.” Barbie Pittman looked pained, her perfect lipsticked mouth turned down. “A sort of strip mall. Ugh.” She drew up her shoulders.

  “What was all this Stockbridge business about?” I asked.

  “Daddy Leaford, of course. It seems he grew up there, even posed once for Norman Rockwell. Remember that prom scene Saturday Evening Post cover painting? The boy and girl on a date at a soda fountain? The soda jerk was her father. He always said Littleboro reminded him of Stockbridge.”

  Now I had to laugh. Littleboro, North Carolina, as the flip side of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. How many people never in their lives knew there was an underbelly, another side to everything? She gave me a little three-finger wave and moved toward the checkout line. Guess she had to smuggle her box of cake mix home before somebody else saw her little secret. Did “Pastor” even know she used a mix? What else didn’t he know?

  Chapter Forty

  Back at the Dixie Dew I iced three layers, four more to go. Ida Plum brought in sheets from the clothesline and started at the ironer. This house was filled with good home smells: baking and ironing.

  Then I heard the sound of sawing and hammering from the backyard, peeked out and saw Scott with his helper, Randy, hard at work on the gazebo. Could he have it up, painted and ready for Ossie’s wedding? I was betting on it, if he had to keep working on it by shining his truck’s headlights into the backyard at night, or rig up some sort of outdoor light with an extension cord plugged into the back porch light. Weddings and funerals go on as scheduled most of the time and the world stops for a bit. Pauses, reflects, takes a deep breath.

  The Raleigh News & Observer, which we counted on for our “real” news, had a half-page obituary of Debbie Booth with a cute, perky photograph of her looking as if she was alive and a listing of all her awards for food writing, her best selling cookbooks. It did not list cause of death, something I was still waiting to learn. No calls from Ossie about the fingerprinting. Maybe living in Littleboro had slowed down his New Jersey angst or he was so busy basking in his marital status-to-be he’d put his big-city crime busters on the back burner. He had said I’d hear from him, but so far I hadn’t. Too much wedding on his mind, maybe? I hoped.

  Mama Alice had owned two of the original big old KitchenAid mixers on stands and I had both going. The queen of mixers, these “girls” kept on beating and mixing. Pound cakes, layer cakes, meringues, buttercream frosting, royal icing. They knew butter and sugar and flour and rose to every occasion, doing Mama Alice proud.

  I piped trellises in royal icing, arbors and garden gates. Oh that I could ever have the real things in my back garden! But I piped icing and dreamed. I hadn’t done royal icing in a long time, not since my teens, with Mama Alice looking over my shoulder. Yet now it felt a bit like she still stood behind me, saying, “That’s it. Curve it a bit more. Curley-q she goes.”

  I had ordered a little bridal couple for the top, but Juanita wanted real roses, fresh roses, along with the icing ones. I guess Juanita just couldn’t get enough roses to suit her. I wondered if Ossie would be the type to ever bring her roses on not-so-special occasions after they were married? Somehow I couldn’t picture Mr. DelGardo with a bouquet of anything in his hand. Gun, yes. Handcuffs. But not flowers.

  White roses I’d have to get delivered from Raleigh if Debbie Booth’s fans hadn’t bought them out from every florist in town. I bet the day of her service there would even be some enterprising vendors selling boxes of Kleenex and embroidered memorial handkerchiefs to the line of fans waiting to get into Edenton Street Methodist Church.

  And I couldn’t be there. I had this damn wedding to put on or pull off or whatever the occasion called for. Not that I’d be missed, but I had sent in a donation to the Southern Food Ways Alliance Debbie wrote about so much. That left some roses for other fans to buy.

  Ida Plum kept the ironer going, piling up a stack of freshly ironed sheets beside her. Scott and Randy hammered away. The gazebo had a shape, skeleton though it was, and I hugged both guys, Scott the longest. He smelled like cut lumber and had sawdust in his hair. I tousled it. He caught my arm and pulled me in for another hug. “You just love to get close to real work, don’t you?” he teased.

  “What?” I said. “Baking, icing, decorating in a hot kitchen isn’t work? At least out here you got a breeze.”

  I made them a snack, even whipped up oatmeal cookies. And b
eer, of course, a local ale Mr. Gaddy stocked in the back of his drugstore. Honey Locust.

  “You’re a honey,” Scott said. “The girl of my dreams.” He winked. “And heart.” Like he could read my mind and chagrin about last night and this morning with Miles Fortune.

  I had been so busy I’d forgotten about Miles and now I remembered, could guess he’d been down filming the remains of the courthouse. Perfect image for his “theme.” The South in Ruins. For all I knew he could be a firebug, been the one to start it. He’d sure shown up fast and Johnny-on-the-spot to start filming it.

  And here he was staying in my house that was two hundred years old, without a sprinkler system, built of pine boards dry as paper. Not that I didn’t already have enough to worry about.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Ida Plum made the cheese straws and when they came from the oven we roasted Honey Hot Nuts. Then she grated vegetables for the little tea sandwiches and I made pimento cheese. No reception could be held in Littleboro without pimento cheese and some sort of pickle. Baby gherkins, you made your own or bought some at the Farmer’s Market, but you had to have a sour to cut the sweets. John Blue down at the diner even had a pimento cheeseburger on his menu. It was sloppy to eat, you had to use a knife and fork, but it was really good.

  After the pimento cheese, Ida Plum got two mixers with pound cake batter going full-speed for cake squares just in case the wedding cake wasn’t enough. I had stored the wedding cake layers in the basement freezer and when I put in the cheese straws, I noticed behind me on the wall shelves and shelves of canned vegetables. Beets, corn, tomatoes, lots of green beans. Every pantry in Littleboro probably looked like this. Mama Alice had a backyard garden and all the summers of my childhood I had weeded, watered, picked vegetables and “got them ready for the canner.” When was any of this canned? It had been years since Mama Alice had much of a garden and done canning. “It’s cheaper to buy stuff now than to grow it,” she’d say, “and a whole lot less work.”