Savannah Blues

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “She’s having visions,” James said. “At your cousin Lucy’s house. There’s a statue of the Infant of Prague. She says it’s crying real tears. So she prayed about it, and the Infant told her he’s crying for you. Because of your sins. You know, the divorce, and the homicide.”

  I felt sick to my stomach. “My own mother believes I’m capable of murder?”

  “Maybe it’s the change of life,” James suggested.

  “She went through that ages ago, remember? When she dyed her hair black and bought that Subaru?”

  “Well, something strange is going on with her. A plaster statue is telling her this stuff, if it makes you feel any better.”

  “I guess I better go see if I can settle her down. I don’t suppose you’d like to join us for a lovely family meal, would you?”

  “Oh jeez. I’d love to. But my stomach’s been acting up.”

  “It’s pot roast,” I said.

  “I think I feel a cramp coming on,” he said.

  “Coward.”

  Mama had the dining-room table set with her good microwave dishes. The pot roast smelled delicious, surrounded by canned peas and watery instant mashed potatoes.

  We said the blessing and Daddy hacked valiantly away at the roast with a carving knife, eventually slapping two cinderlike slices on my plate.

  “Gravy?” Mama passed the sauceboat to me. I spooned the greasy-looking glop over my meat, hoping to moisten it enough to chew.

  Mama and Daddy exchanged looks. I knew I was in for it.

  “Uh, Eloise, uh,” Daddy started.

  “Joseph, talk to her,” Mama said.

  Daddy stared down at his plate. “I was wondering, uh, what kind of tires you’re running on that truck of yours?”

  “Tires?” I was drawing a blank. “I don’t know. Round. Black. Rubber, I suppose. Do they still use rubber to make tires?”

  “Hell no,” Daddy said, getting worked up. “It’s all synthetics now. Come out of who knows where. China or Korea or someplace. I was noticing those tires of yours are looking pretty bald. What you need is a good set of steel-belted radials. American-made.”

  “OK,” I said. Maybe dinner wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we were just going to talk about tires. “I guess I am due for new tires, now that you mention it.”

  “Joseph!” Mama said sharply.

  “We’ll, uh, talk about that later,” Daddy said. “Right now your mama is very concerned. Uh, when was the last time you went to church?”

  They both know the only time I go to mass is with them, to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I decided to head the discussion off at the pass.

  “What’s this all about, anyway?” I asked, looking directly at Mama. “Uncle James said you’ve been having visions. Is that true?”

  “The Infant of Prague is weeping. For your sins,” she said.

  “A statue? A statue thinks I committed murder? Mama, it’s impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible,” she snapped. “Not for a believer. Now finish your food. We’ll go over to Lucy’s and you can see for yourself.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I said, reaching for a roll. These, at least, I knew would be edible, since they came directly out of a Pepperidge Farm carton.

  We ate in silence. Mama’s hand rested silently on her tea glass. Twice she went to the kitchen for refills. She was looking extremely glassy-eyed.

  “I’ll clear,” I said, jumping up from the table as soon as I’d pushed the food around my plate for a sufficient amount of time.

  Mama looked up, surprised.

  “Your daddy always does Sunday dishes.”

  “Not today,” I said. “You two go on in the den and put your feet up. I’ll have the dishes done in a jiffy, and then we can take a ride over to Lucy’s.”

  After I heard the television switch on in the den, I closed the kitchen door and went to work. It took only a few minutes to rinse the dishes, load them in the dishwasher, and wipe down the counters and stove.

  I went through the cupboards, one by one, and the drawers too. I finally found the bottle of Four Roses in the bottom of Mama’s ironing basket. It was only about half full. I dumped most of the bourbon into the sink, leaving about an inch in the bottom of the bottle. I added water until the bourbon was at its original level, then went looking for something to add for color.

  Vanilla would make it smell wrong. Mama’s bottle of Gravy Magic was on the counter, but it would make the bourbon taste wrong. Then I spotted the pitcher of iced tea on the counter. Perfect. I added the tea to the water. It was a dead ringer for Four Roses.

  “All set,” I said, standing in the door of the den.

  Cousin Lucy’s house was a neat redbrick box on a narrow street in Thunderbolt, which used to be a fishing village on the edge of the Wilmington River, but the shrimp mostly played out in the 1980s, and now Thunderbolt is just a suburb of Savannah.

  Mama unlocked Lucy’s front door. I stepped inside and nearly passed out. The place smelled like the bottom of an ashtray.

  “Whew!” I said, fanning my face. “Now I know why that statue’s crying.”

  “Blasphemer. Let me just air it out a little,” Mama said, bustling around drawing the drapes and opening windows.

  The air helped, but not much. I looked around the living room. Everything was a dull yellow; walls, floors, drapes, and even the frayed and spotted wall-to-wall carpet. Everything had a thin nicotine-tinged sheen to it.

  “Isn’t this nice?” Mama said, running her hands over the arm of a sofa. “Cousin Lucy spent a lot of money on this furniture, you know.”

  The sofa was an overstuffed roll-arm number from the forties, with maroon cut-plush upholstery. There were two matching armchairs too. I’d have snapped them up in a minute at another house, but here they had that sick yellow tobacco sheen. To be usable, they’d have to be stripped down to muslin and re-covered. Not an inexpensive proposition.

  “Look at this dining-room set,” Mama said, moving through the arched doorway into the next room.

  It was a good solid Grand Rapids, Michigan–made mahogany dining suite, again from the 1940s. There was a table, six chairs, a sideboard, and a china cabinet. I saw sets like this in every other estate sale in Savannah.

  “Real antique,” Mama said. “We were thinking maybe a thousand dollars for the whole set. A bargain, right?”

  “Very nice,” I said, trying to sound noncommittal. The varnish on all the furniture had blackened with age and would probably need to be stripped. Again, not too profitable.

  “The bedrooms are back this way,” Mama said. I followed her into the hallway. She stopped in front of a small niche in the wall and fell to her knees.

  “It’s the Infant of Prague,” she whispered, gesturing toward the niche.

  The Infant of Prague looked like every other statue I’d seen in every other little old Catholic lady’s house I’d ever been in. Painted plaster, with a bemused look on its face. But no tears, that I could see.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Because he knows you’re not a believer,” she said.

  “Whatever.”

  I poked my head into what must have been the master bedroom. It had the usual assortment of religious pictures, plaques, and shrines. The furniture wasn’t too bad. Lucy’s bed was a high-backed carved Victorian piece, and there was a matching oak bowfront dresser with mirror, a washstand, and a nightstand. The cigarette smell, however, drove me back into the hallway.

  “We’ve gotta get some air in here,” I said, coughing.

  Mama and I managed to get some windows open, and I found an old box fan in a closet, which I set up in the hallway to create cross-ventilation.

  She stood in the doorway of Lucy’s room. “This oak stuff is junky, I know, but I think maybe Lucy’s mother passed it along to her.”

  The “spare” bedroom had a set of badly scarred mahogany furniture consisting of twin four-poster beds, a highboy, a lowboy, a dressing table, and two nightstands. I
t was of the same era as the dining-room furniture, good, solid, respectable, boring brown furniture.

  The bedspreads were pink chenille, with large rose medallions. If I could ever get the essence of Virginia Slims washed out of them, I could sell them on the Internet for a hundred dollars for the pair.

  “Well?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Her face fell. “I told the cousins you’d probably buy everything.”

  “I know,” I said apologetically. “But I just took on a bunch of inventory yesterday. All my money is tied up in it, and until I sell it all, I just don’t have any cash ready to lay out for more stuff.”

  “We could wait,” Mama said.

  “No,” I said. “Tell you what. I’ll take the stuff in the two bedrooms. Would three hundred be enough?”

  “For that trashy stuff? But what about that beautiful antique dining-room set? Surely you’d rather have that. It’s real mahogany, you know.”

  “It’s lovely,” I lied. “But I don’t have the room to store furniture. I think you and the cousins should have an estate sale. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  “I suppose,” she said, wavering a little.

  “Good,” I said, picking up my purse. “If you give me the key, I’ll come back after I drop you off at home, and I’ll load the bedroom furniture in the truck.”

  “You can’t lift that heavy stuff,” Mama said. “And you know your daddy’s back.”

  “I’ll get a helper,” I said. And I had a very good idea of the sort of helper I needed. I got my checkbook out. “Who do I make the check out to?”

  She pressed her lips together. “Well, the cousins said they’d prefer cash. You know, what with your arrest record and all.”

  Chapter 35

  I really did need help moving all that heavy furniture, I told myself while driving over the bridge to Tybee. I circled past his house twice. His truck was there. It was his day off. A little heavy lifting, I told myself. That’s all I wanted.

  Right.

  I knocked, but there was no answer. From inside the house I heard the high-pitched whine of a power saw. Go home, I told myself. Call Karl. Karl is my handyman. He does odd jobs for me. Like moving furniture. Karl is fifty and bald, and he doesn’t believe in deodorant. But he has his own moving dolly and a ramp for his pickup truck. Call Karl, I told myself, opening Daniel’s front door and stepping over a pile of lumber.

  But Daniel was standing with his bare back to me, bending over a board laid across a sawhorse, moving a power saw smoothly across the board. His shoulder muscles rippled as he worked, and I instantly forgot about Karl.

  Daniel was sweaty and half naked, and his jeans hung just right on his hips, which were narrower than his shoulders, and I could see the waistband of his Jockey underwear. And I wondered, since when did I get turned on by seeing a man’s underwear, and I told myself, since right now.

  “Daniel!” I called loudly.

  He finished the cut, and the end of the board clattered to the linoleum floor.

  “Daniel!” I called again. He turned around, with the saw still in his hands. His eyes widened in surprise. He cut the power switch.

  “Hey,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  Good question. What was I doing? He had sawdust in his chest hair. I wanted to wipe it off. Start there. No. Bad. Very bad. I closed my eyes to try to rid myself of the mental image I had, of the two of us, rolling around in a bed of sawdust.

  “I, uh.” My voice came out a squeak, like Minnie Mouse inhaling helium. “I sort of need a favor.”

  He put the saw down on the floor and grabbed a T-shirt from the back of a chair and pulled it over his head. Good. Much better. I could think clearer without looking at his chest, not to mention the washboard belly.

  “Yeah?” he said casually. “What kind of a favor?”

  Daniel walked over to a red Igloo cooler and pulled out a bottle of Rolling Rock. He held it up toward me. “Want a beer?”

  Yes. A beer. Very good for clearing up voice problems. No. I had work to do.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I just bought a load of furniture, and I want to move it out of the house it’s in. Just up the road in Thunderbolt.”

  “In Thunderbolt,” he repeated.

  “The guy who usually helps me move stuff is out of town,” I said. Technically, this was true, since Karl technically lives in Port Wentworth, which is, technically speaking, an incorporated city, not a part of Savannah per se, thusly, out of town.

  “The furniture is actually in my mother’s cousin’s house. I guess that would make her my cousin too,” I nattered on. “She died last week, and I’m buying some of the furniture, sort of as a favor to my mother. But I need to move the stuff so they can get the house ready to sell.”

  Daniel took a swig of beer. He sat on the edge of the sawhorse. “And when you think of manual labor, you think of good old Daniel.”

  I frowned. “No. Well, yes. I mean, you’re strong. You work out. I can’t move the dressers by myself. They’re big and heavy. Not to mention the beds.”

  Beds. I groaned inwardly. Dumb. Now I was blushing beet red.

  “Beds, huh?” Daniel said. “Why don’t you ask your ex-husband to give you a hand with those? He looks like he’d be the handy type.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that,” I said, not looking up. “I want to apologize. It’s not what you think. He was drunk. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

  “What did he want?” Daniel’s voice was light. No big deal.

  “Pity,” I said. “He wanted me to know things hadn’t worked out with Caroline. He wanted me to know that he misses me.”

  I looked up at him, hoping for some glimmer of understanding. He just nodded, like he’d heard it all before.

  “Actually,” I said, correcting myself, “I think he made it pretty clear it isn’t really me he misses, as much as my cooking. And my coffee mugs.”

  “Coffee mugs?”

  “He’s a WASP,” I said. “Very repressed. His mother still buys most of his clothes.”

  “It’s not just your cooking he misses,” Daniel said, watching me. “He’s still in love with you.”

  “You think?”

  “He was practically baying at the moon last night,” Daniel said.

  “He ate my chocolate seduction and spilled wine on the carpet. I was afraid he’d yak all over my sofa,” I said. “I kicked him out.”

  “This time,” Daniel said. He took another long swig of beer.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You kicked him out because he was drunk and acting out. But if he showed up at your door sober, all pressed and showered, it’d be a different story. You’d go running right back to him.”

  “No,” I said, lifting my chin. “It’s over. I’m over him. That’s what I was trying to show you last night. On the sofa.”

  Daniel sighed. “Were you trying to show me—or were you trying to show him? Trying to make your ex-husband jealous, so he’d realize what a good thing he was missing out on? You had to know he’d see my truck parked out there. Hell, Tal was probably looking in the windows at us. Is that some kind of turn-on for you? Some sort of sick O. J. Simpson deal?”

  “No,” I shouted. “God. Is that what you think of me? You think I’m playing games with you?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “You tell me. One minute you’re telling me not to touch you or look at you, the next thing I know you come downstairs wearing nothing but a bathrobe.”

  “It was a kimono,” I said. “And I was covered from my neck to my ankles.”

  “And you were naked underneath,” he shot back. “Talk about your mixed messages.”

  “OK,” I said, choking back the tears, determined not to let him see me being a crybaby. “Never mind. If you think I’m a big tease, if you think I’m playing games with you, never mind. I’m going now. Sorry to have insulted you.”

  With great dignity and deliberation, I
turned around to leave.

  “Shit,” I heard him mutter.

  “You’re making me crazy, you know that?” he called after me. “I move back to Savannah, think I’m gonna have a nice, uncomplicated life. Cook a little, fish a little, fix me up a beach shack, maybe sleep with a waitress or two. Nice and slow and simple. And then you walk in and screw everything all to hell.”

  “Sorry to inconvenience you,” I said, not bothering to turn around, my hand on the front door.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Just let me lock the place up and I’ll help you move the damn furniture. But I’m not moving any pianos, and I’m not doing any second-story stuff. You understand?”

  I sniffed. “I understand.”

  Chapter 36

  “Whew,” Daniel said as he stepped into the living room at Cousin Lucy’s house.

  “I warned you.”

  He looked around the living room, ran a finger over an end table coated with nicotine sheen. “Just think what the woman’s lungs must have looked like,” he marveled. “How old was she when she died?”

  “Ninety-three,” I said. “The tar was probably the only thing keeping her alive.” I pointed toward the hallway. “The bedrooms are back that way.”

  He poked his head into the guest room. “Start here?”

  “Why not?”

  I stripped the chenille spreads off both beds, followed by the sheets and the rest of the linens.

  “Almost looks like somebody’s been staying here,” Daniel said, pointing toward the open closet door.

  A row of blouses and slacks hung neatly from the clothes rod. “Hey,” I said, pulling out a familiar pink flowered number, “this is my mother’s.”

  I picked up a pillow and sniffed it. Aqua Net hair spray and Four Roses. Marian Foley’s signature scent.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “She’s been sleeping in this bed.”