by Tamar Myers
“That would be our house,” Mama said.
I gasped.
Bob grinned. “Fantastic! Would it be possible to tour your house?”
“Absolutely,” Mama said, and patted her pearls.
“Mama, that’s not possible!” I hissed.
“Shh.” The bolt cutters found the merest suggestion of a love handle and closed.
I yelped. The tour guide with the squeaky voice stopped her recitation midsentence and glared at me from beneath her bouquet-laden bonnet. I in turn glared at Mama.
“I’m afraid our house is a mess at the moment,” Mama said smoothly. “Yesterday was the maid’s day off, and she isn’t expected in until”—she leered at the Rolex—“until eleven. Could you come back this afternoon?”
Bob glanced at the troop of tourists, who were being led down the street by the glaring guide. He seemed torn.
“What time this afternoon?”
“How about three, dear? I could serve you tea. No, wait, I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we meet you for lunch someplace at noon. We can fill you in on the ghost then.”
“But I will get to see your house, right? Maybe even meet the ghost?”
I cleared my throat. “Actually, they prefer to be called Apparition-Americans.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Ghost is a pejorative term, and I’m afraid that Hollywood has added insult to this injury. Casper, Ghostbusters, that kind of movie—Apparition-Americans find those very offensive.”
“Oh?”
“Ignore her,” Mama said.
I braved the pinchers. “Bedsheets and chains, that used to be the stereotype. Now it’s ectoplasm and goo. Can you blame them for being upset?”
Mama stamped her right pump. “Enough, Abby! Besides, Patrick Swayze played a ghost, and he was far from gooey.”
“True. I believe you referred to him as yummy. You said you wanted to eat him with a spoon. But that movie was an exception, Mama. No, I think Maynard is going to want editorial control over this project.”
“M-maynard?” Mama stammered.
“Yes, Mama, our resident Apparition-American. And I’m sure that Esmerelda—she’s Maynard’s wife—will want to get involved with costuming. She used to be a set designer in real life—oops, I shouldn’t have used the R word. Esmerelda is very sensitive about that. And whatever you do, don’t use the word ‘haunt.’ ‘Inhabit’ is the word of choice. Apparition-Americans inhabit a house, they don’t haunt it.”
“I see.” Bob Crane was backing away from me like plague from penicillin.
“And be careful of sound-alike words, too. They can be just as painful. Mama here got in big trouble for using the word ‘ghastly’ in front of Maynard. He wouldn’t speak to her for a week. Made her apologize big time.”
“That’s all nonsense,” Mama said, but it was too late. Bob Crane’s mushroom legs had already melded with those of the rest of his group. Mama whirled. “Abigail Louise! Why on earth did you do that?”
“Exactly, Mama. What were you going to do? Tie up Albert Quarles while you served a stranger tea in his house? And what about his wife? She’s not going to stay at Junior League all day.”
“I would have thought of something,” Mama wailed. “That’s why I suggested lunch first. You might have been able to hook him over a good steak. Or better yet, something French.”
“Hook him?”
“Snag him. You know, get him really interested.”
“And what do you mean I might have been able to hook him? Why me?”
“Well, you must admit, he’s not exactly my type, dear. But he’s rich and works for a movie company. Need I say more?”
“Absolutely not, Mama.”
I, on the other hand, had plenty that needed saying. I grabbed Mama’s hand and literally dragged her down the walk and over the square to the nearest Bank America. Along the way I gave her Lecture Number 384. I tried to make it clear that my love life is none of her business, and even if it were, Greg Washburn and I are doing just fine. We both just have trouble committing. If you think about it, this is better to figure out before wedding vows are exchanged. Mama had no choice but to listen, although I doubt if she heard a word.
Suddenly she gasped and tugged on my hand like a child headed for the candy counter. “Abby, look over there! It’s Tom Hanks.”
I glanced at the park bench she indicated. The man sitting on it looked nothing like Tom Hanks. This guy was drop-dead gorgeous. I’m ashamed to admit that, like an acquiescing parent, I allowed Mama to pull me over to the candy.
“You’re Tom Hanks, aren’t you?” Mama gushed. “I’ve seen all your movies, but Forrest Gump was my favorite.”
Gorgeous grinned but said nothing.
Mama was undeterred. “I just know Sally Field’s part was based on me, wasn’t it? Go on, tell my daughter it’s so.”
“Mama, please!” I hissed. Like I said, the man did not look like Tom Hanks, but he did look familiar. Perhaps he resembled some young star I’d seen in the movies lately.
Mama let go of my hand and patted her pearls. “Not that I mind you basing the part on me, you understand. But you should at least give me credit.”
I tried not to roll my eyes, but they may have slipped a little. “Mama, even if he was Tom Hanks, what would you expect him to do? Have the credits changed on rental videos?”
“Well?” she demanded of the bench-warming man.
He had the nerve to nod.
Mama beamed and turned to me. “I told you so, didn’t I? Maybe next time you’ll take my word for it, Abby.”
“Mama, this is not Tom Hanks. This man has a full head of hair, and besides, he’s a lot younger.”
“Abby, don’t be rude!” Mama turned to the impostor. “Say something from the movie.”
Boy Gorgeous blinked. “Ma’am?” he said in three syllables.
“Aha!” I said triumphantly. “This is a southern boy!”
Mama was undeterred. “Say something from the movie!” she commanded.
Her victim swallowed hard. “Life is a box of chocolates.”
“Wrong!” I practically shouted. “Forrest Gump didn’t say that. Forrest said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates.’”
Mama’s pearls began to rotate slowly around her neck. “Well, one word isn’t such a big deal. The poor man had a lot of lines in that movie.” She turned to her hapless prey. “Tell my daughter who you really are.”
He blinked again. “My name is Joe, ma’am.”
Mama’s hand froze in midtwirl. Then, much to my surprise, she giggled.
“Of course it is. We wouldn’t want our little secret to get out, would we? Heavens, no! You’d be swamped with pushy tourists.”
I snatched Mama’s free hand and hauled her, feet dragging, from the park.
Harriete with only one T led us back to the vault. Against my better judgment I allowed Mama to tag along.
“What’s in that box is going to make my daughter very rich,” Mama bragged.
“Mama,” I whispered, “enough.”
“But it’s true. Her Aunt Lula Mae died, you see, and left her a coin collection worth millions.”
“We don’t know that,” I said through gritted teeth.
“Albert Quarles thinks it’s so, and he’s an expert pneumatic.”
“Numismatist!” I hissed.
“That’s what I said. Anyway, we didn’t even have a clue about the collection until the mortician showed us a penny that had been taped inside the lid of Lula Mae’s urn. Fortunately for us the mortician was the numismatist’s brother-in-law. I guess it’s also fortunate that Lula Mae left her safety deposit box key with her lawyer. Abby, you still have the key, don’t you?”
I stopped and rummaged through my purse. The key was in a small white paper envelope, but alas, my pocketbook is the final resting place of good intentions. In it you will find the button that fell off my blue cardigan winter before last, and which I still mean to reattach—provided I can find
the sweater; antique store brochures, collected from my rivals, that I intend to file; a ragged envelope of grocery coupons so old they might be even more valuable now than when they were valid; price tags from a blouse I never quite got around to taking back to Sears; a half roll of petrified, lint-covered breath mints I’ve been meaning to throw out; ditto for four spent alcohol swabs and a wad of tissues; two combs (one was borrowed from my daughter, Susan); a church bulletin from the last time Mama forced me to go, which lists an address to which I can send parcels to needy folks in Honduras; a book of stamps which now need auxiliary helpers; and two wallets, one old, one new—I’ve been meaning to switch my cards and license ever since Mama gave me the Lady Buxton for Christmas—and several fistfuls of pralines.
“Well, dear, do you have the key or not?” I’d memorized the box number off the envelope, and Harriete with only one T had led us there, but we needed both keys to open the box.
“It’s in here someplace,” I growled, my fingers sifting through a mound of small change, most of it pennies, and none of them valuable. At least not to my knowledge.
Harriete with only one T sighed impatiently. “Ma’am, if you don’t have business here, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“But I do have business here. I have—well—in here someplace I have—uh—here!” The little envelope containing the key had been hiding inside the larger envelope with the coupons.
“You see!” Mama said triumphantly. “Now just wait until she opens the box!”
9
Mama and I stared at the empty box. Harriete with only one T stared too. She, of course, had no business being there.
I found my voice. “Well, if stale air is selling at a premium, then we’re rich.”
“But it has to be in there!” Mama wailed.
“Obviously it isn’t. And anyway, we have no proof there even is such a collection.”
“Mr. Quarles is an expert, and he said—”
“He said he suspected there might be a collection somewhere. It could be hidden somewhere in her house.”
“Ha!” Harriete with only one T snorted. She was hovering over me like the Goodyear Blimp at a football game.
I turned, and since I am a southern lady, spoke without rancor. “This really is none of your business, dear.”
“Well, ma’am, maybe it is.”
“I don’t see how,” Mama said icily. She is, of course, southern as well, but her age permits her more latitude.
“Maybe it is,” Harriete with only one T said defensively. “If you ask me, it’s kind of strange, y’all coming in here and not finding the key right away, and the box being empty.”
I stood as tall as I could in my size fours. “What I keep in this box is none of your concern. I’m free to deposit hot air in here if I want to. Heck, I could even store Mama’s old dentures in here, and you’d have nothing to say about it.”
“I don’t wear dentures!” Mama hissed.
Harriete with only one T had hands like catchers’ mitts, and she propped them on her ample hips. “Maybe I should report you to the manager. In fact, I will. This isn’t your box, I just know it.”
“I knew the number, didn’t I?”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Go ahead and report me to the manager. Call security if you want”—I took a minute to eye her hovering hulk—“although that would be overkill. Just as long as my key is the one that opens the box, it’s none of your damn business.”
“You go, girl!” Mama may be my biggest critic, so to speak, but she’s also my biggest fan.
“Harrumph!” Harriete with only one T was the first person I’d ever met to actually pronounce that word as it’s written.
Emboldened, I waved her back. “Just run along, dear. We’ll call you if we need you.”
Harriete with only one T took a second to give me the once-over. “I’ve memorized what you look like. Both of you. If I need to, I can give the police artist a photographic description.”
I started blowing air into the long metal box just to irritate her. Too bad Mama didn’t really wear dentures.
“Think you’re funny, don’t you?” Harriete with only one T stomped off, presumably to fetch a security guard.
“I smell something,” Mama said quietly.
“The box smelled that way before I blew in it!” I wailed.
Mama’s nose twitched like a rabbit in a carrot patch. “Not that. I smell trouble.”
I knew then what she meant. You might find this hard to believe, but my mama, Mozella Gaye Wiggins, can literally smell trouble. She has proved this claim so many times that I now take it seriously.
“What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know, but it’s big trouble.”
“How big?”
Mama’s nose twitched so fast her entire body shuddered. “B-b-big trouble. L-like s-s-somebody’s going to die.”
My heart did the rumba. “It’s not you or me, is it?” “No.”
“Wynnell and C.J.!”
“Not them either. At least, I don’t think so. Oh, Abby, let’s get out of here. This vault gives me the creeps.”
I slid the drawer back into place and turned the key. “Okay,” I said, just as Harriete with only one T returned, a burly young man at her side.
Mama and I skedaddled without further ado.
Stepping into the lobby was like coming up for air from a long dive. Stepping outside into the bright spring sunshine was utter bliss. While Mama’s olfactory track record is amazingly accurate, adjustments must be made for latitude and longitude. Perhaps her amazing shnoz had sniffed the odor of Aunt Lula Mae’s death, albeit rather tardily. Surely folks didn’t die on days like this. “Mama,” I said, and then gasped as talons dug deep into my elbow. I whirled. “What the hell!”
“Shh!” The old woman who called herself Diamond held a crooked black finger to her lips. “It only me.”
“I know who you are,” I snapped, my heart now racing to a jitterbug beat. “What the hell is it you want?”
“Abby,” Mama clucked. “You shouldn’t swear so much.”
“But she—”
“And you,” Mama said to Diamond, “a woman your age! Don’t you know any better than to wear white this time of the year?”
I glanced at Diamond’s ensemble. Same straw hat, but she was wearing a white cotton dress studded with eyelets and elasticized at the waist. Above the band hung two breasts (completely covered, of course), and between them a black felt pouch on a dirty string and what looked to be a chicken’s foot. Below the band, the gathered skirt fell almost to the wearer’s feet, which were clad, alas, in white plastic sandals.
“You have broken the eleventh commandment,” I informed her somberly. “Thou shalt not wear white between Labor Day and Easter.”
Diamond cackled. “And folks think I’m strange!”
I did my best to smile. “Perhaps it’s that chicken foot. What are you, some kind of voodoo practitioner?”
Diamond cackled again. “I don’t do that devil stuff. No, ma’am, I stay away from curses and such. I’m what they call a herb doctor.”
“You fix sick plants?” Mama asked, suddenly willing to abandon her position as chief of the fashion police for a little free horticultural advice. “My rosemary bush has been dropping its little leaves, and it’s not supposed to, is it? I thought it was an evergreen.”
When Diamond shook her head, her entire upper body moved. Breasts and chicken foot swayed.
“I don’ doctor no plants. I fix people. Folks like you and me. I give them herbs—potions sometimes—to cure what ails them.”
Mama sniffed the air dramatically. “Abby, I think she’s telling the truth. At least she’s not dangerous. Not to us.”
“I ain’t dangerous,” Diamond agreed emphatically. “But somebody is. I needs to talk to you ladies.”
I glanced around. We were still standing in front of the bank, and people were coming and going with regula
rity. Some of these people were giving us mighty strange looks.
“Okay, let’s talk. But how about over there in the square. Chippewa Square, isn’t it?”
“Where they filmed Forrest Gump,” Mama purred. She tugged at Diamond’s forbidden white sleeve. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but he’s there right now.”
Diamond scowled and took a step back. “Who there?”
“She thought it was Tom Hanks,” I said quickly. “But it was some other guy. Just a kid really.”
Mama shook her head vehemently. “It’s him. Just look for yourself—” She gasped. “Abby, he’s gone!”
The bench was indeed empty. In fact, the park was devoid of people altogether unless you count the statue of James Edward Oglethorpe. It was such a handsome likeness, it should count for at least half a person. Nine feet tall without his pedestal, the bronze founder of Savannah is splendidly arrayed in the uniform of a British general of the period, a sword in his hand, a palmetto leaf under his foot. His creators, I am told, also did the seated Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C.
“See what you did?” Mama wailed. “You chased him away!”
“I did no such thing!”
Diamond cackled. “This ain’t no time for fighting.”
“She’s right,” I said, and dashed across the street. Fate must have been looking the other way, because I nearly got creamed by a car. The driver—a woman on a cell phone—made no attempt to swerve. Her front bumper came within a radio wave’s width of my rear bumper, which, Buford’s aspersions aside, is not all that big.
Mama and Diamond followed suit, but instead of dashing dangerously across among an onslaught of cars, they took their sweet time, walking just as sedately as you please. Horns honked, and brakes squealed, but they made it to my side safely.
I headed toward the nearest park bench. My legs felt as if they’d been carved from warm butter, and I desperately needed to sit.
“Not there, Abby!” Mama called. “I want to sit over here.”
