“You really do like to cook,” I said.
“The lunch part was no joke,” he said. “You like soup?”
“Soup? Isn’t it kind of hot to make soup? I was expecting maybe peanut butter and jelly, or grilled cheese.”
“Sit,” he said, pointing to a battered wooden step stool in the corner. “You want some wine?”
“No thanks,” I said, shuddering at the memory of this morning’s hangover.
“Water, then.” He took a pitcher from the fridge and poured me a glass.
I sat on the stool and watched. BeBe was right. People would pay money to watch Daniel cook.
His movements were quick, economical. He pulled a container from the fridge, opened it, and showed me the shell pink contents.
“Chilled seafood bisque,” he said. “You like seafood, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
In seconds, he’d chopped a handful of herbs and dropped them into the soup, then whisked in some white wine from an open bottle in the fridge.
From a basket under the makeshift countertop he pulled a long loaf of French bread, which he quickly sliced into six-inch segments. From another basket he produced two huge tomatoes, which he cut into thick slices, which were in turn topped with some kind of creamy white cheese that was stored in a water-filled dish in the fridge.
“Buffalo-milk mozzarella,” he told me, seeing my look of interest. “We get it flown in from Atlanta.”
Once he’d built the sandwiches to his liking, he brought out a paper-towel-wrapped packet of herbs and placed a few leaves on top of each sandwich.
“Basil,” he said. “I grew it in pots in town. I’m hoping it’ll do well out here too.” Over the basil he poured a quick slick of olive oil from a half-gallon tin he kept on the countertop.
He ladled soup into two mismatched bowls, which he placed on a tray with the sandwiches and two bottles of the Amstel beer.
“Let’s eat on the porch,” he said.
We sat on upended Sheetrock paste buckets, and I ate the finest picnic I’d ever tasted in my life.
When we were done, I washed the dishes while Daniel unloaded his treasures from the truck.
“Want to go for a swim?” he asked, coming back into the kitchen.
“No suit,” I said apologetically.
“Hmm.” He said, running his hands through his hair.
“Never mind that,” I said. “This has been wonderful, Daniel, but I really need to get home.”
“OK,” he said. “But the ocean will still be here. And the invitation stands.”
“Maybe another time. When I have a bathing suit,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said.
Chapter 23
I could hear the phone ringing as I unlocked the back door to the carriage house. I didn’t hurry because I knew who the caller was. I unclipped the leash from Jethro’s collar before picking up.
“Eloise?” It was Mama. She’d started calling me that again, probably because she knows it makes me nuts.
“Yes, Mama,” I said, taking gulps of cold water from the jug I keep in the fridge.
“I prayed for you last night.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
“Did I tell you I’ve had to stop going to regular morning mass at Blessed Sacrament?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. I scanned the headlines in the Morning News, hoping my name wouldn’t be in any of them. A story had run nearly every day since Caroline’s body was discovered, and of course, they used the worst photo of me they could find—the one taken as I was coming out of jail in the sailor dress.
“Yes. People were looking at me funny. Especially Father Morrison. I’ve been getting your daddy to take me to six-o’clock mass out at the Church of the Nativity in Thunderbolt.”
I yawned. “That’s nice.” It was Thursday. I’d picked up the Pennysaver paper on the way home from the park. It has the best classified ads for yard sales. Sometimes I can hit a good one on Fridays, although in Savannah, sales mostly just run on Saturday mornings.
“But your daddy is threatening to quit taking me out there,” Mama was saying, her voice suddenly all quavery.
“Why’s that?” I was marking up the Pennysaver with a felt-tip pen, circling the ads that looked promising. I was only half-listening to her. There was an estate sale in the Victorian district, East Gwinnett right near the park. I tried to picture that block in my mind, but Mama kept going on.
“Your daddy doesn’t like that evening mass at Nativity. It’s the folk mass, you know. And everybody stands up and sings the whole mass, and they have banjos and drums and I don’t know what all. Your daddy calls it karaoke church, and he says if he wanted to go to a honky-tonk he’d go down to River Street and get him a cold beer instead of standing around with a bunch of hippie types at Nativity.”
I tried to picture my father’s idea of a hippie type. Probably anybody who didn’t have a flattop crew cut and wear short-sleeved sport shirts, neatly pressed chinos, and well-polished tie-up shoes like my daddy.
“Mama,” I said, pushing the paper aside, “I’m sorry you feel like you can’t go to your own church. Maybe you should have a chat with Father Morrison. Ask him why he’s giving you the evil eye all of a sudden.”
“I know why,” she said, going quavery again, like a ninety-year-old stroke victim, instead of the perfectly healthy seventy-year-old scratch bowler she is.
“Why’s that?”
“Don’t get mad at me,” Mama said. “It’s because of you. Eloise, I can’t believe you’ve gotten our family mixed up in this sordid mess. Now everybody thinks you killed Tal’s girlfriend. Because they know you went to jail, and you threatened to kill her out at that Beaulieu place.”
“Mama,” I said, my voice getting stern. “I can’t help what people think. It’s not my fault Tal had an affair. It’s not my fault we got divorced, and he got engaged to that woman. It’s not my fault she got killed, and I cannot control what people are saying about me, or how some mental defect priest looks at you, or what kind of songs they sing at Nativity. Now I suggest you just hold your head up high and ignore all this mess. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
A little sob came over the phone. “I told your daddy you’d get mad and yell at me. He wants to talk to you.”
There was a silence, and then I heard the distant sound of change jingling and throat clearing. Daddy was on the line.
“Weezie?”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“You got enough money?”
“Yes, Daddy. I’m fine for money.”
“Your mama tell you about church?”
“She mentioned it.”
“They have church in the lunchroom out there at Nativity this summer. Did she tell you that?”
“No. Just about the music.”
“Damned odd, I call it. Going to mass in a school lunchroom. Place smells like stewed rutabaga. I never could abide rutabaga. You know what George Finnegan calls that church, don’t you?”
“What does he call it?”
“Our Lady of the Cafeteria.”
“Very funny, Daddy.”
“Well, that’s all I wanted to tell you. When you coming over here? I got a big old basket of zucchini for you, and some banana peppers too. The garden’s really coming in good this year.”
Good thing Daddy couldn’t see the face I was making. Every year he planted a big garden, and every year he had a bumper crop of zucchini. Mama and I made zucchini bread and zucchini fritters and zucchini stir-fry. I even tried a chocolate zucchini cake recipe I clipped out of the newspaper. Jethro was the only one who would eat it.
Mama came back on the line then.
“Eloise?”
“I thought you said Daddy wasn’t going to plant zucchini this year,” I said accusingly.
“He didn’t,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Last year, I started taking the zucchini out and burying them in the backyard. I just couldn’t look another zucchini in the face. I g
uess they just reseeded themselves this year.”
“Somebody’s got to put a stop to this,” I muttered. “Have you thought about pouring Clorox or something on the plants?”
“I might,” she said. “Listen, Sarah Donnellen called me last night, and she said—”
“I don’t care what Sarah Donnellen said,” I shouted. Mama hung up the phone on me.
“Damn,” I said, looking down at Jethro, who seemed alarmed that I had raised my voice. “If I’d known she’d hang up on me like that, I would have yelled at her ten minutes ago.”
I was circling estate sale ads in the Morning News when I heard the familiar rumble of a tour bus—but in an unfamiliar place—it sounded like it was coming not from the street in front of the house, but from the lane behind it.
From the lane? Impossible. The city council had finally enacted tough restrictions on local tour operators, making it illegal for the buses to stop on residential streets, and they were banned altogether from the lanes. Anyway, why would tourists care about seeing a bunch of trash cans and carports? I stuck my head out the door to check for myself.
Sure enough, a bulky diesel-spewing “Scenic Savannah” double-decker tour bus was idling right outside my door. People were hanging out the windows, pointing video cameras in my direction. The tour guide, a spindly middle-aged woman wearing a ridiculous-looking antebellum ball-gown and flowered sunhat, was standing at the front of the bus, speaking into a microphone.
The sound blared around me. “Notorious local murder case,” I heard the woman say, followed by the click of camera shutters. “Ex-husband’s new lover found shot to death in historic Savannah plantation house…Police believe antique dealer stalked prominent young woman architect and killed her out of revenge.”
My face burning, I fled back inside the house. I felt nauseous, dizzy. I felt furious. It was the last straw. First a murder suspect, now a damn tourist spectacle. My fingers shook as I dialed the police.
“Savannah Police?” I said, when the dispatcher answered the phone. “I want to report a tour bus. It’s parked illegally in the lane behind my house. On Chariton Street. The three hundred block.” I was choking back tears. “I want the damn bus impounded. I want the driver and the tour guide arrested. And I want the damn tourists deported,” I shouted, and then slammed down the phone.
After I calmed down, I took a shower and got ready to go to the grocery store. I was unlocking the truck when I heard a commotion at the trash cans in the lane. Charles Hsu, my eighty-year-old neighbor, was stuffing a bag of garbage in the city-issued green plastic bin next to mine.
“Hey, Mr. Hsu,” I called. “How are your tomatoes coming along?”
Every year Mr. Hsu and I have a friendly competition to see whose tomato plants produce the most fruit. It was never a real contest because Mr. Hsu’s plants were some top-secret variety he’d grown all his life.
Now, though, Mr. Hsu turned and glanced over at me, but didn’t speak. He shoved the trash in the bin and scurried back toward his side of the fence.
I sighed. Mr. Hsu wasn’t the only neighbor shunning me. The day before, as Jethro and I were crossing Charlton Street on the way to the park, I spotted Cheryl Richter pushing the baby jog stroller with little Eddie in it on the opposite side of the street. Lots of mornings we walked in the park together. Eddie loved Jethro, and for him the feeling was mutual.
“Hey, Cheryl,” I called. But she kept on her side of the park and at the corner of Abercorn made a point of turning away from the park.
All right, I told myself. Maybe my neighbors had suddenly developed acute hearing loss, or maybe they had a vision problem—they couldn’t see themselves consorting with an accused murderer.
Notorious. Jean Eloise Foley, I told myself, cruising toward the Kroger on Habersham. You are notorious.
When I got to the Kroger, I decided to keep my sunglasses perched firmly on my nose. Incognito, I thought. I’ll do the Kroger incognito.
Once I was inside the store the dark glasses got me thoroughly disoriented. I’d left my shopping list at home, and the morning’s distractions had scrambled my brains in a bad way.
I was standing in the produce aisle, staring down at a display of lettuce, trying to decide what kind to buy, when I heard a high-pitched, excitable voice.
“Eloise? Eloise Foley, is that you, honey?” I looked around. Everything was a murky, underwater green. But even green, I recognized Merijoy Rucker.
Damn. First Mama. Now Merijoy. I was doing penance for a sin I hadn’t even committed.
Merijoy had a big bag of red bell peppers in her hand. She dropped them into a shopping cart loaded with children, and enveloped me in a bony, Dior-scented hug.
“Sugar,” she gushed. “How awful for you. I have been beside myself with worry. Are you all right?”
Before I could answer, she turned to her shopping cart full of kids. All of them had white-blond hair and huge brown eyes.
“Renee,” she cooed. “Sweetheart. Don’t give Rodney jalapeño peppers, darlin’. They’ll burn his little mouth.”
Renee looked to be preschool age, maybe five. Her long, tanned legs were jammed into the compartment of the cart where I usually set my purse. Her face was smeared with what appeared to be either blood or the filling of the raspberry doughnut she was waving with one hand.
The lower section of the cart housed a slightly younger, boy-type version of Renee, who looked to be about four. Rodney, I assumed, since he was holding a partially chewed jalapeño pepper in his hand and howling loud enough to wake the dead.
There were two more children in the cart too, a pair of twin toddlers, a boy and girl, clad in look-alike yellow sunsuits. “Mommy, we’re hungry,” they chirped.
In one smooth motion, Merijoy snatched the pepper out of the screaming child’s hand and flung it to the ground. She reached down into the cart and twisted the top off a plastic jug of Hawaiian Punch and held it to the child’s lips. He stopped screaming and gurgled it down. In the next second, she’d opened a box of animal crackers and handed them to all the children.
“All set?” she asked. The children, who strongly resembled a nestful of baby starlings, sucked contentedly on their cookies.
“I am so glad I ran into you,” Merijoy said, clutching my arm for emphasis. “I told Randy last night, after they ran that awful story about you on channel twenty-two, I said, ‘Randy, poor old Eloise is being railroaded for this thing.’ ”
I tried to say something, but she went rushing on. “Of course, all my neighbors have been asking if I know you—from St. Vincent’s and all. And I told them, ‘Eloise Foley would not hurt a fly.’ But honey, that’s not what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to say is, I’ve got the most marvelous idea. And it’s so nice I ran into you like this. Because I was planning on calling you just as soon as I dropped Renee at tennis lessons, and Rodney at play group, and get Rachel and Ross down for their naps. This is just too perfect. Eloise, Randy and I would just adore it if you would be our guest for dinner tomorrow.”
“Well,” I started to say.
“It’s our turn to host supper club. And the host gets to invite another couple. Just a few people, really. And you’re to bring a date, of course. Unless you would like for me to invite somebody for you.”
“No,” I finally managed. “I don’t think I can make it. Thank you, Merijoy, for thinking about me, but really, I’m not very good company these days.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You’ll be with friends. Dear, sweet, wonderful friends. Now, I won’t take no for an answer. You’ll come, and that’s all there is to it. Seven-thirty sharp, and you know where we live, don’t you, sugar?”
At that moment, one of the twins started making choking noises. I looked down. Little Rachel seemed to be going blue around her lips.
Merijoy frowned, reached down with one hand, and thumped the child on the back, at the same time cupping her other hand under Rachel’s little rosebud lips.
“Spit, sweetheart,”
Merijoy said urgently. “Spit out the nasty cookie.”
She was rewarded with a handful of regurgitated animal cracker.
“Wonderful,” Merijoy said, beaming as though the kid had presented her with a bouquet of roses instead of a handful of hurl. She deftly deposited the fistful of baby puke in a plastic produce bag, which she knotted and tucked into her pocketbook.
“Rachel, darlin’, remember what Mommy told you? Chew and then swallow. It’s not a real lion, darlin’, so it won’t really hurt him when you bite his little head off.”
“Now,” she said, wiping her hands on a premoistened towelette that seemed to materialize from nowhere, “let’s see. You know our house, don’t you? It’s the third house in from Habersham, at Forty-fifth Street. Ardsley Park, of course. I know, not the historic district, which Randy and I adore, but with five little ones, we really needed more room.”
“Five?”
“Oh,” she said, seeing my confusion. “That’s right, you don’t know about the baby. Little Randall is at home with Hattie Mae. I can’t get anything accomplished with him along.” She sighed heavily. “Sixteen months old and he’d nurse all day long if I let him.”
I had a mental picture of tiny, perfectly groomed Merijoy Rucker with five writhing children climbing over her, barfing in her hands, sucking at her breast. I shuddered and was again speechless, which Merijoy took to be an acceptance to her dinner invitation.
“Wonderful,” she said. “We’ll see you Friday then. And Eloise, it really is seven-thirty, not Savannah time at all.”
That, at least, I understood. In Savannah time, if you’re invited somewhere at eight, it’s bad manners to show up before nine. Savannahians have a deep-seated dread of arriving early for any social function.
“The boys get quite cross if we stretch cocktails past eight-thirty,” Merijoy was saying. She patted me on the shoulder, and I could swear she left a trail of cookie spit on my skin.
Savannah Blues Page 15
