by Peggy Webb
George Blakely doesn’t stand a chance.
Chapter 10
Sunsets, Pompadours, and Pig Pens
Before I know what hit me, I’m headed to George’s hot air balloon. Suffice it to say, a woman fueled by indignation and scented with Jungle Gardenia is a lethal weapon.
The balloon is moored in the north section of the massive Bancorp South Convention Center’s parking lot, walking distance from the festival if you don’t mind crossing the railroad tracks on foot. Lovie, George, and I are game, though I’ll have to say the heat takes its toll on him. Maybe Texas is not as humid as Mississippi or maybe George is not as physically fit as he looks. Or it could be that tight jumpsuit. Whatever the reason, by the time we get to the balloon, he’s sweating like a mule on the back forty.
He takes a white handkerchief out of his pocket and mops his face before extending his hand to help us into the basket. It’s roomier than I’d have imagined. And the view will be splendid. I can see over the sides, which appear to be tall enough for safety, especially as long as we’re on the ground. I’ll probably change my mind once we’re airborne.
As we lift off the asphalt, we gather quite a crowd. The basket sways and so does my stomach. I glance over to see how Lovie’s faring, and she’s hanging on for dear life. Strike hot air ballooning from our long list of things we want to do before we die.
Lovie and I have been keeping a list since we were eighteen. So far we’ve checked off some pretty dangerous pursuits. Spelunking and rock climbing top the list. Both Lovie’s suggestions. Don’t let her size fool you. She’s the athletic, adventurous type. I’m more the quiet, artistic type. Puccini opera in Florence tops my list.
We’re planning a trip to Italy next summer, unless she’s so deeply involved with Rocky she can’t bear to leave him. Then, of course, there’s a small hitch with Elvis. If I were to leave him for three weeks, there’s no telling what kind of revenge he’d take.
The balloon ascends in a slow, lazy kind of way. If I change my mind about this mode of transportation, there’s still time to jump over the side without breaking major bones.
Naturally, I’d never leave Lovie, who is now flying high with her eyes closed.
“Isn’t this great?” George says, and I nod my head, afraid if I open my mouth I’ll lose lunch. He does something to the vales and other thingamajiggies, and all of a sudden we swoosh upward so fast, bailing out is no longer an option. Skimming the tops of Jim’s Barbecue and the Greyhound Bus Station, I risk a peek down.
My stomach lurches, then settles back into place. I can do this.
It’s only when we waft over the top of the Tupelo Police Station that I realize I’m in the balloon with a possible killer and nowhere to run.
Whose bright idea was this, anyway? More to the point, what am I going to do if George confesses in midair?
I punch Lovie, who sneaks a peek, then shuts her eyes again. It’s all up to me.
Turning my back to the view, I say, “So, George. There must be hundreds of tribute artist competitions. What brought you to Tupelo?”
He pulls out his handkerchief and mops his face again. If I didn’t know he’s a veteran ballooner, I’d say he didn’t like swinging above the treetops in a puny basket any better than I do.
“It’s the Birthplace.” He gives me this funny look.
Okay, so I don’t get any points for brilliant interrogation techniques. I’m new at this. It’s not as if I plan to make criminal investigation my life’s work.
“Is this your first time here?”
“No.” Wincing, he grabs his stomach. “Barbecue.”
“It’ll get you if you’re not used to it.” Strike that. How could a Texan not be used to barbecue? “I guess you got to know our famous local impersonator well. Dick?”
George turns pale, twitches a time or two, then breaks out in a serious sweat. I never expected such a reaction. I ram Lovie again in the ribs. Hard. If I’m going to face down a killer, I want a witness who’s watching the action.
“Lovie has a theory about Dick’s wife, Bertha.”
“I do?”
I elbow her again to get her full attention. “Tell George what you were telling me.” She can spin a lie that would fool a psychic. “Go on, Lovie. Don’t be shy.”
The balloon picks up speed at an alarming rate, and the Calvary Baptist Church steeple looms right in our path. Holy cow. Before Lovie can come up with a story, we’re going to be skewered.
You’d think George would be altering our course. Instead he’s starts jerking around like a man gone crazy.
Or having convulsions.
“Lovie. Quick,” I yell, just as George topples over the side of the basket.
We lunge, the basket tilts, and we end up sprawled on George’s bottom half while his top half dangles over Calvary Baptist. One false move and all three of us will spill out and spatter downtown Tupelo.
“Hold on tight, Lovie. Don’t move.”
“If I hold him any tighter, we’ll be banned in Boston.”
Trust Lovie.
“George, are you all right?” I guess he’s too scared to answer. “I’m going to grab hold of you. Okay?”
Silence. I’m praying he’s just fainted with all the excitement. Inching my hands upward, I latch on to his belt.
“Can you move your arms, Lovie?”
“What you want me to do? Pick his pocket?”
“Grab his belt. Now. On the count of three, pull. One, two, pull.”
I haul backward as hard as I can, but George is still not moving. Come to think of it, neither is the basket.
“What’s wrong?” Lovie says, and I ask, “Are you pulling?”
If the word she says filters through the church roof to the preacher’s office, he’ll have to call a special prayer meeting just for her.
“Let’s try again, Lovie.”
This time part of George inches into the basket, but it’s only his pants. If we haul backward one more time, he’s going to lose them.
“Hold it,” I say. “Something’s got George on the other end.”
“Who do you think it is? St. Peter?”
If I knew a word, I’d say it. Fortunately I don’t have language habits I’ll have to clean up when I become a mother.
Lifting myself gingerly on one elbow, I crane my neck to see over George.
“It’s the steeple, Lovie.”
“He’s hanging onto the steeple?”
“No. But his wig is.”
The overblown, wiry pompadour I’d viewed as George’s unfortunate hair now turns out to be his biggest fortune. If it weren’t for that cheap mop of synthetic hair, he’d be on the pavement by now.
“Grab his legs, Lovie. We’ve got to pull him loose.”
Easier said than done. A wad of wig as big as my fist is lodged on the steeple. We might as well be trying to separate George from a lock and chain.
The basket careens madly as we play tug-of-war with the steeple, but George doesn’t budge. At the rate we’re going we’ll be suspended forever over Calvary Baptist Church. Country singers will write ballads about us and Lifetime TV will do a movie that will make fanatics revere our bones.
I’m too young for sainthood.
Lovie says, “What does he have this thing on with? Superglue?”
“One more time, Lovie.”
“I don’t have one more pull in me.”
“You’re not a quitter. Pull.”
With Herculean effort that fractures ribs (I’m certain) we rip George’s toupee loose from the steeple. All three of us topple backward and George lands at our feet.
Dead.
“See if he has a pulse, Lovie.”
“Who do you think I am? Florence Nightingale? If you want to check his pulse, be my guest.” Lovie turns her back and retches over the side of the basket.
And that’s when I notice we’re no longer tethered to the church steeple; we’re sailing east beheading trees and threatening planes. Even worse, nobo
dy’s steering. And sunset is approaching. Balloon doom time.
I leap into action. Actually what I do is stand in front of the mysterious mechanisms wondering how long we can stay aloft, whether the crash will kill us, and how long it will take somebody to discover three bodies in the basket.
Lovie staggers over looking like the victim of a train wreck and stands beside me, staring. I’d feel better if she’d try to do something, but still, it helps just having her close by.
Meanwhile, we’re picking up speed. Soon we’ll be out of Tupelo.
“We’ve got to do something,” I tell Lovie, and she does.
She leans over the basket and yells, “Help.” Before I snatch her bald-headed, I realize we’re over the festival and maybe she’s on to something, so I lean over the side and scream with her.
A few specks (translated: people so far away they can’t possibly hear us) wave, and then we sail over the Birthplace and waft our merry way over East Tupelo’s golf-ball-shaped water tower. Did I say missing it by half an inch?
Veering sharply, the balloon takes a southeasterly track. We’re over farm county now, cotton and soybean fields, pastures and cows. We scare them so badly they’ll never produce milk again.
Meanwhile the hiss and puff of the balloon hardware sounds repitilian. And I’m terrified of snakes.
Don’t let anybody tell you balloon travel is romantic. Especially when there’s another dead Elvis rolling around at your feet.
Lovie and I start twisting valves, knobs, and doodads while I invoke Mother Earth, Mother Teresa, and the Spirit of St. Louis (Charles Lindbergh’s plane). For good measure, I send a plea toward Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
When my cell phone rings, I nearly startle out of the basket. Scrambling on the floor of the basket while trying to avoid contact with the corpse, I dig it out of my purse.
The caller ID panel is lit with salvation.
“Uncle Charlie. Oh, thank goodness.”
He was a pilot in Vietnam. Why didn’t I think of him twenty minutes ago?
I babble out our latest predicament with Lovie making helpful comments on the side.
“Tell Daddy I don’t want to be buried in pink. Tell him I don’t want any preaching over my body. Tell him—”
“Shut up!” I yell, and she does, though I have every reason to believe I’ll pay for this later.
“Stay calm, dear heart,” Uncle Charlie says. “Tell me your location.”
“What if I lose signal? What if we lose gas?”
Lovie says, “I don’t think it’s gas,” and I give her a look.
“Callie, Callie.” Uncle Charlie sounds rattled, a new twist for him. “Can you tell me where you are?”
“I don’t know.” From this vantage point, every farm looks alike. For all I know we could be in Alabama.
“What do you see?”
“Cows. A barn. A pigpen.”
“Callie, listen to me. I want you to do everthing I tell you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to talk you down.”
If I ever get my feet on terra firma again, I’m staying there.
Elvis’ Opinion #6 on Mismatched Anatomy, Psychic Powers, and Guilt
Personally I never did believe George was guilty of anything except bad taste. Case in point, his wig.
Naturally I’m too polite to say I told you so. I just sit in the funeral home with my mismatched (but not so you’d notice) ears cocked and listen to both ends of Charlie’s telephone conversation with Callie.
Some people think eavesdropping is tacky, but how else is a dog to figure out what his human mom needs? Forget all that mind-reading stuff. Dogs can read auras and smell spikes in temperature and divine the emotional terrain of their humans, but we’re not psychic.
From the sound of things, it’s going to take a whole lot of couch time to calm Callie down after this balloon escapade. (That would be me sitting on the sofa in her lap with no room left over for upstart cocker spaniels, thank you very much.)
While Charlie’s talking Callie and Lovie out of the air, Bobby Huckabee comes into the office all primed to report on the embalming going on down in the basement.
How do I know this if I can’t read minds? I happen to know the late great public school music teacher, Philestine Barber, is on the table, and I can smell Bobby’s eagerness a mile.
Still on the phone, Charlie waves him to a seat, but Bobby squats down to scratch behind my ears. Charlie just hired him two weeks ago and we bonded instantly. Mostly because Bobby recognized my worth right off the bat, but also because he has mismatched eyes. One blue, the other green. You might say we formed a mismatched anatomy club.
Bobby claims his blue eye gives him psychic powers, and who am I to discourage him? Take every chance you get to feel good about yourself. That’s my opinion.
Maybe we could crack this case if we’d enlist Bobby. I’ll bet his visions would coincide exactly with my theories. Forget spurned lovers and card cheats. Whoever is knocking off these Elvises doesn’t like their singing any better than I do.
Right now, though, my main concern is not who’s guilty of murder; it’s Callie.
Charlie’s mopping his face while he talks with her. Listen, Charles Sebastian Valentine is one of the coolest men I know. He doesn’t sweat; he just handles the problem. For him to show this kind of emotion, my human mom is in a heap of trouble.
If I were the worrying kind, I’d be gnawing my paws. But I’m not a worrywart; I’m a doer. I politely ease over to Charlie, get as close to the receiver as I can, and howl a few bars of “Amazing Grace.”
I know my human mom better than anybody, including my human daddy, unfortunately. If he’d listened to me, he’d still be sitting pretty reading the Sunday morning paper in the gazebo, drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice, and enjoying Callie’s big fat Stearns and Foster mattress. Among other things I’m not fixing to divulge outside this family.
But that’s a whole ’nother consideration. Right now, the point is to get Callie down safely. She’s a great believer in the power of prayer. Never mind that she’s got this hodgepodge of angels and spirits and deities she turns to. The point is, her beliefs give her strength.
But nothing does it better than a great gospel song sung by the greatest singer of all time.
That would be yours truly, thank you very much.
“Is that Elvis?” I can hear the catch in her voice. “Oh, Uncle Charlie. Tell him I love him. Tell him I’ll see him soon.”
I never doubted it for a minute. Does a cat have a climbing gear? Then Charlie Valentine’s going to get Lovie and my human mom down from that balloon.
Chapter 11
Pork Revenge, Hog Death, and Handcuffs
“Hang on, Lovie!”
We grab the sides of the basket while the balloon plummets between a giant oak tree and a grape arbor. It rips off branches, collapses supports, and scatters grapes before it deposits us on the ground with teeth-jarring force. Lovie is thrown on top of dead Texas Elvis, but I manage to remain upright.
“Lovie, are you all right?”
“If you ever mention hot air balloon to me again, I’ll shoot you.”
I take that as a yes. Anxious to get out, I swing one leg over the side of the basket when I hear a roar of outrage. And it’s not coming from my cousin.
Swiveling toward the left, I look right into the beady eyes of a mad boar hog. Holy cow! We’ve landed in the middle of the pigpen, and the head pig monster is bent on revenge.
I jerk my leg back so fast I topple into Lovie, who had barely gained her feet. While we huddle in a screaming heap, the rampaging hog rams the side of the basket with his snout.
My whole body is shaking and my head feels funny, but I’m not about to be outdone by a farm animal.
“We’ve come too far for death by hog,” I tell Lovie.
“What do you propose we do? Invite him to George’s funeral?”
“Fight back.”
“With
what?” Lovie asks.
“Anything you can get your hands on.” She reaches down and I add, “Except George.”
“Spoilsport,” she says, jerking off her boot (which she is fond of wearing with peasant skirts, even in summer).
I grab my purse and hit the hog over the head, yelling, “Shoo” while Lovie whacks him with her boot, a lethal weapon if I ever saw one. It’s a size 8 with a steel-reinforced heel.
She whacks his snout and the mad hog retreats squealing his outrage.
“Lovie, run.”
We hightail it over the basket toward the fence with me trying to keep up. Lovie scrambles over and I’m not far behind.
At last. Freedom.
Or not.
The lanky, sunbaked farmer who is suddenly standing over us in his dusty overalls doesn’t look like the welcoming committee. More like a lynch mob.
“The grape arbor you gals took down with that contraption is going to cost you a pretty penny.”
Furthermore, he’s brought backup—the Lee County sheriff. Who doesn’t look happy to see us, either.
“You again.” Sheriff Trice gives Lovie the evil eye. At least that’s what I’ll call it when I retell this story. If I live to retell it. “What brings you to Plantersville in a balloon?”
Without waiting for an answer, he climbs over the fence and waves his hands at the mad hog, who trots off and starts rooting under an oak tree as if he never had any intention of ripping Lovie and me to shreds.
Any minute now Sheriff Trice is going to discover another dead Elvis.
I can’t just sit here without reporting it first. That will make us look guilty. Getting up, I brush off the seat of my skirt, but after that race through the pigpen I don’t even want to think about the state of my Burberry ballerinas.
“It was an unfortunate accident,” I call after Sheriff Trice. “All of it.”
Where’s Lovie? Soon we’re likely to be handcuffed and hauled off to jail, and she’s over there under a sweet gum tree talking on her cell phone.
