Sleuthing Women II

by Lois Winston

  I bracketed the warm ceramic with both palms. “Thank you, Anna.”

  She was about my age, and I liked her very much, but we had nothing in common.

  Nikos didn’t help with the coffee. He was Old World and regarded such things as women’s work. But he hovered near Anna and watched her as though she might disappear in a puff of smoke. That was the danger of marrying a much younger woman who looked beautiful even with bags under her eyes.

  In spite of the situation, my stomach wailed with hunger.

  “Goodness gracious,” my mom said. “You should have eaten some eggs.”

  “Mom, no one wants eggs.”

  She scurried to the kitchen as though on a life-saving mission of her own and returned with a plateful of banana bread.

  “Carol baked it,” she said proudly.

  I didn’t volunteer that I’d pilfered the loaf from Archibald’s. In a half-shift on Christmas Eve morning, I’d already turned out so many pieces for Christmas brunch that one loaf wouldn’t be missed.

  With my AA in culinary arts, I was a good baker, but right now, even though I was famished, the treat tasted like cardboard.

  Slowly we deflated into seats and somberly regarded each other, twisting red napkins and tapping our feet, debating what to do next.

  THREE

  Desperate to talk to someone, I decided on my mother. If one couldn’t trust her mother, whom could she trust?

  I tugged on my mother’s knitted chartreuse vest. In her hobby, my mother felt compelled to use up even the most hideous yarns. “Waste not, want not,” she’d say. I didn’t enlighten her on how right she was about the want not part.

  “Where are you going?” Teddy asked.

  “Out. For a little fresh air.” In the secret code of family, my tone conveyed he was responsible for the current air being not fresh.

  “Like that?” Teddy eyed my PJ’s, but I ignored him.

  My mom and I put on our shoes by the back door. My mom topped her head with a John Deere cap sitting on the Formica counter, and we escaped the scene.

  Outside the house, away from the drama, Beanie’s death hit me. I put a hand to my chest and choked back a sob. But my mother was not the type to put her arm around someone.

  The weeds added to my gloom. My mother had been a gardener all her life, so the oval of overgrown grass, and the roses that weren’t cut back, spoke of her aging, the eventual end of all things.

  The sky was properly overcast, too.

  “Mom,” I said, “did you tell anyone about that crazy idea I had for a screenplay?”

  “Murder for Dessert?”

  “No, Smoked to Death, the one I let you read.” I had known that was a mistake even as I’d handed her the manuscript. She liked that I made a living as a baker in a high-end establishment. She didn’t want me getting big ideas about precarious jobs like screenwriting.

  My mother tugged at the collar of the plaid, flannel shirt under her chartreuse vest. “The subject came up.”

  “When?”

  “Thanksgiving,” she said shortly, tipping up the bill of her cap. Gray streaked the hair popping out beneath it.

  I sighed. Not good.

  The long grass swished against the bottom of my flannel pajamas as we meandered toward the empty lot that abutted my mom’s property. Donald and I had spent a lot of time ducking down in the field’s weeds and bushes, hiding from each other, or from our mom.

  Mom crossed her arms over her chest. “You didn’t tell me I couldn’t talk about your writing.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to blab about it to everyone.” I worked hard to be a self-sufficient adult, but after one day with my mother, I had regressed to a whiny sixteen-year-old. “Who was here for Thanksgiving?”

  Her wrinkled face drooped, sad as a basset hound’s. “You should have told me not to discuss it.”

  I resisted telling her that such a request shouldn’t be necessary. “Just tell me who you told.”

  “I told people about the idea because I thought it was clever.”

  My heart panged at the praise. Compliments from my mom were rare and always sincere. But clever was the problem. Had my idea in the screenplay been clever enough that someone decided to use it?

  I gave my mom a sidelong glance. Out of everyone assembled here, she had the thickest skin, and she was the one person I knew for sure had encountered my idea. I only had her word that she’d shared the info in Smoked to Death with others. Could my own mother be a murderer?

  But why would she kill Beanie? Simply because he irked her to death?

  “Mom?” I prodded. “Who else knew?” Supposedly.

  “Well, when I was talking about the plot, your Uncle Beanie was outside having his cigar.” Mom sniffed with puritanical disapproval. “So, he didn’t hear it.”

  I heaved an impatient sigh.

  “But I was there, of course.”

  “Of course.” I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and squeezed, fighting back an impending headache.

  Mom stopped at the gray split-rail fence. “Carol, I really hope you don’t continue with this silly theory of—”

  “Murder.” I expected her to clap her hands over her ears, but she just made a disappointed tsk. I continued. “Who else was there?”

  “Well, Nikos and Anna. Anna got up to try one of Teddy’s Balkan Sobrainies. I didn’t even know she smoked. She went out to join Beanie.” Mom scratched at her face. “She didn’t stay long, though. I figured she got too chilly outside, or Beanie said something inappropriate.” She sighed. “You know how Beanie is.” She stopped. “Was.”

  The cold had penetrated my pajamas and seeped to my bones. “So, Teddy was here,” I murmured. Leave it to Teddy to smoke something pretentious. “How about Doreen?”

  Mom shook her head.

  Probably weary of defending Teddy’s lack of success, his wife Doreen had become a master at avoiding these family functions.

  “I wish she were,” Mom said. “Maybe she could have kept Teddy from making goo-goo eyes at Maureen and acting like a blithering idiot.”

  I leaned on the fence, which leaned with me. I quickly straightened. This was an interesting little tidbit. If Teddy’s flirtation with Maureen went back to Thanksgiving, and she hadn’t beaten him off with a stick, maybe he had reason to think he might “get lucky” last night.

  My mom and I headed back toward the house. “Brandon was outside with the girls,” my mom added, remembering.

  She meant Anna and Nikos’ kids, who this Christmas holiday had flown off to visit their grandparents.

  “And you didn’t come,” she added, stopping to finger the rose hips clinging to the bushes. “These are quite medicinal, you know?”

  What I knew was that my mom had not let her bushes go to hips so she could brew herbal potions. Donald, her good kid, had made forays up from San Francisco to help tend the large lot until his disease rendered him unable to do so. Now it was clearly too much for an aging, single woman.

  My spirits were as soggy as my high-tops. “I think someone stole my idea.”

  Mom quirked an eyebrow. “Someone plagiarized it?”

  “No, someone used nicotine patches to murder Uncle Beanie.”

  The cold-inspired rosiness of her cheeks faded. She shook her head.

  “At Thanksgiving,” she said, grappling with the idea, “Maureen complained about Beanie’s cigars, and we all got on the topic of stopping, and how quitting nicotine is harder than kicking heroin. That’s when I told them about Smoked to Death.” She returned to tugging at her collar as if it were strangling her. “You cannot believe someone in this house committed murder.”

  I could. I did. But I didn’t see any point of trying to convince my mom. Her convictions were as strong as addictions. Besides, she’d told me what I wanted to know: everyone currently in the house had been introduced to the means. I needed to focus on motive and opportunity.

  A bang like a gunshot made me jump.

  FOUR
>
  The noise was just the back door hitting the house. “Hey, you guys!” Brandon streaked toward us, his long tail of hair flying. “The paramedics said the sheriff won’t be here for a loooong time. There’s some big domestic violence thingy. Are we going to unwrap the presents or just forget about ’em?”

  “Where’s your jacket?” Mom said, although neither of us had worn one.

  We shuffled back to the house, mulling the metaphysical question of whether one should unwrap gifts with a dead man in the house, although Uncle Beanie would have been the first to tell us to carry on.

  We gathered by the tree, a melancholy group, stiffly aware of the young paramedics waiting in their vehicle, leaving us to our supposed grief. For them, an old dead man lying peacefully in his bed on Christmas morning hadn’t raised any red flags. The call to the sheriff was bureaucratic procedure.

  Mom pulled off a semblance of normality by suppressing any discussion of the M word. Since our family only pretended normality in the first place, it didn’t feel that different.

  I settled back on the floor. The fire, tended by Nikos, glowed and crackled. The warmth stirred the scent of the oranges Nikos had brought for my mother, heaped in her best bowl on the coffee table.

  The angel I had made in third grade with a cone of paper and white pipe cleaners graced the top of the Christmas tree. Even though it had lost most of its glitter, my mom faithfully put it up each year.

  Brandon grabbed a present from under the fir and thrust it into Anna’s stomach.

  “What a hand off,” Anna said sweetly, although she looked as pale as tissue paper.

  Nikos touched Brandon’s shoulder. “Slow down there, big guy.” Nikos’ massive arm curled around Anna’s delicate shoulder.

  From the other end of the couch, my mom added, “Make haste slowly.”

  But Brandon swooped back to the pile of presents and like an octopus whirled each of us a soft package wrapped in recycled Christmas paper, the designs splotched by the removal of former tape. Without reading the tag, we knew these were from my mom. We opened them carefully, so my mom could reuse the paper yet again. We all had a pretty good idea what we’d find, anyway.

  Mom had knitted us slippers with pompoms the color of her vest. Anna and I slipped ours over our socks. One identical package remained—the one meant for Beanie. I swallowed hard.

  Brandon came to the rescue by hanging his slippers over his ears. He then dove back to the remaining packages. When he delivered a present to Teddy like a Frisbee, the man jumped from the wing chair and caught his son’s arm.

  “You stand right here and calm down until I have time to unwrap this damn thing.” He yanked the slippers from Brandon’s ears and threw them on the carpet.

  With Brandon cut from his role, we were all focused on Teddy as he opened a small, flat, blue foil package.

  “This is from Beanie,” he said solemnly.

  Teddy’s elegant hands extracted an envelope. No two brothers could have been more different than the tough, stocky, driven, successful, cigar-chomping Beanie, and this thin, effete-without-the-means man.

  Teddy slit open the envelope with a fingernail and extracted a certificate. “A subscription to Money Market magazine!” He leapt from the chair. “God-damn him. I don’t care if he’s dead. That’s the truth.” He strode to the fire and tossed in his present, wrapping and all.

  “Don’t put foil in the fire,” Mom said. “And remember we have company,” she added, as if anybody could forget Nikos, Anna and Maureen, all frozen to their seats.

  A pillar of rage, Teddy turned from the fire.

  “He’s taunting me even after he’s dead.”

  Although I knew Teddy was a big baby, I was surprised to see the mist in his pale eyes.

  Teddy jabbed a finger toward my mom. “He cut us out of his will.”

  Mom shrugged and plucked up her bag of knitting from beside the couch.

  “How do you know that, Teddy?” I asked.

  “I called Trevor,” he spat back.

  “You called an attorney on Christmas? At home?” That was a new low, even for Teddy. I bit hard on my lip, forcing myself not to hurl at him how Beanie had kept Teddy’s family afloat for years with the generous salary he and Nikos paid Teddy’s wife. Instead, I asked, “And what did Trevor tell you?”

  Teddy aimed the finger at me. “He didn’t leave you nothing, either,” he sneered, starting to cheer up.

  “How do you know that?”

  Trevor Chamber, Esq. was much too proper to reveal the contents of Beanie’s will over the phone.

  Teddy had center stage now.

  Toying with a ribbon and blinking nervously at his dad, Brandon knelt beside the remaining, nearly forgotten, presents.

  Teddy paced into the middle of the room. “Beanie made a living trust.”

  Without compromising his integrity, Trevor had probably told Teddy that much to get him off the phone.

  “I knew that,” Maureen chimed from the other wing chair.

  I rolled over on the shag carpet so I could face her. “You said he went to make a codicil to the will.”

  “Well, he did,” she pouted. “But he had so many of them, that Trevor advised him to make a fresh start.” She coyly placed a finger beside her lips. “Beanie asked about one of those other things.”

  “A living trust?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Teddy continued, as though we hadn’t spoken. “When a person makes a living trust, he usually lets the trustee-upon-his-death know about it ahead of time.”

  Maureen blanched. “He does?”

  “Yes, he does,” Teddy snapped at her. “Just because Beanie treated me like a financial moron, it doesn’t mean I am one.”

  Now that Beanie was gone, Maureen apparently no longer enticed him. Or maybe he was pissed about being shut down and dismissed the night before.

  “The trustee has a lot of work to do,” Teddy continued. “You don’t want that job thrust upon some unwilling party.” He pivoted in a slow 360, examining each one of us and then spilled more of his venom on Maureen. “Don’t worry. Trustee doesn’t mean beneficiary. You could still be getting something.”

  Maureen perked up a bit.

  Teddy smirked at her. “But then, Beanie was all business. He would have discussed his wishes with his recipients. When he had his will made, he told me exactly how much he’d left for Doreen and me.”

  How much was that, I wondered. Enough to kill for? But Teddy didn’t elaborate.

  “Hell,” Teddy said, “knowing my brother, I bet he already has his casket bought and paid for.”

  Nikos cleared his throat and skimmed back his thick hair with a hammy hand. He, Mom and Anna were sinking into Mom’s couch, the homemade throw knitted in orange and earth tones scooping under them like a hammock.

  Nikos’ big nose twitched. “Beanie did discuss with me about the business.” His hooded eyes gazed sadly at his wife. “He arranged for the title to transfer to me . . . and to Anna.”

  Anna didn’t return Nikos’ stare, but seemed aware of it. She gazed down at the green balls on her new slippers.

  “That’s fitting,” Mom said.

  Teddy steamed back to his seat and plopped down, puffing the air right out of it.

  The business was Beanie’s biggest asset. Nikos had been a mere kid, a hungry immigrant, when Beanie had settled down to his business, but Nikos had been there at his side, working like a faithful mule ever since. I agreed with my mom. But I glanced at Anna. Did Beanie leave her part of the business just because she was Nikos’ wife?

  “What about money?” Teddy glowered.

  “His accounts transfer to me,” Mom said tightly.

  “You?” Maureen yelped. “I’m the one who drove him to the lawyer’s office.”

  Teddy sprang from the chair again, his long hands positioned as if he meant to choke my mom. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  I felt a bit like Teddy, as though I’d been stuck with a cattle pr
od, but Mom said, “It’s nobody’s business.” After a beat of silence, she said, “Brandon, who’s that big one for?”

  Brandon obligingly lunged for the box and ripped into it.

  I had to give Mom credit, both for the evasive maneuver and Brandon’s gift. She’d bought him a “mega-cool” new skateboard and had even found Metallica decals for it.

  “And how about that other big one?”

  Brandon hesitated to put down his new toy, but then obliged and shunted the bulky package over the green carpet to my hands. The secret gift. The moment was fraught with peril. Clearly my mom had made me something. She beamed in my direction, one-hundred-percent proud of her creation. I gulped. Chances were about ninety percent I wouldn’t like it. And I did not have a poker face.

  “Maybe you could speed this up just a little.” Teddy spun his hand.

  Instead I carefully lifted off the tape. After all, the big bundle had required a huge swath of wrapping paper that my mom could reuse. I peeled the gift open as though it were a huge fruit. A patchwork crazy quilt unfurled onto my lap. All manner of sizes and shapes had been hastily machine sewn with no discernible pattern. The quilt corners puckered.

  My mom had inherited more of her Grandpa Turner's impatience than she'd ever admit. Yet, the quilt had so clearly been made for me with deep forest green and dusty rose the predominant colors, a little gold for dazzle, and a ruddy brown to stabilize the menagerie.

  The whole thing weighed a ton.

  “There’s an old blanket sewn inside,” my mom explained.

  I ran my hand over the back, a durable but soft flannel, and almost burst into tears. She must have been collecting and saving these special bits of fabric for quite some time.

  My mom watched me. I didn’t have to say anything. She could see the love written all over my face.

  FIVE

  Although a small stack of gifts remained, I stood, needing to escape.

  “Where are you going?” Uncle Teddy asked.

  “To the bathroom. Is that okay with you?”

  I did stop at the bathroom, but continued down the hall to Beanie’s bedroom, once my brother Donald’s. I held my breath against the emotional avalanche of entering my dead brother’s room alone and without a hubbub of distraction.