Mourning Gloria

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “I’ve often wondered that myself,” I said ruefully. “Gossip travels at the speed of thought. Sometimes I think everybody is hardwired into some sort of central processing unit.” I regarded her. “Did the sheriff say anything else? Anything about drugs, for instance?”

  “Well, yes. Apparently, they found some drug paraphernalia in the place. I didn’t ask him what, specifically.”

  “Could’ve been left by the previous tenants.” I picked up my second piece of pizza, pondering the flavors in Margie’s secret sauce. Basil—lots of basil. Thyme and maybe savory. And bay, of course.

  She tilted her head, her glance sharpening. “Previous tenants?”

  I nodded. “According to my husband, the new owner—Scott Sheridan, at A-Plus Auto Parts—evicted them when he learned that they were doing drugs. I don’t know whether he had time to clean out the place yet.” I gave her a sidelong glance. Jessica—aka Lois Lane, Girl Reporter—was jotting down the information on her paper napkin. I had just made up for spoiling her scoop.

  “Thanks,” she said with satisfaction. “Scott Sheridan. A-Plus Auto Parts. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Don’t tell him I sent you,” I cautioned. If my ex-cop husband knew I’d leaked that information to a reporter, he’d be annoyed.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, with just a trace of self-importance. “I don’t reveal my sources. Unless I’m subpoenaed, that is.”

  “Don’t be,” I said, beginning on my last slice of pizza. “Subpoenaed, that is. It’ll probably happen sometime in your career, but you want to put it off as long as possible. It is definitely not fun.”

  “Right.” Jessica stood up. “I’ve got to take a couple of photos for the story on this meeting, and then I’m heading for dessert. What did you bring?”

  “Carrot cupcakes. Featuring locally grown carrots and pecans, plus wheat flour from America’s breadbasket and exotic spices flown in from the far corners of the earth. I’d hate to calculate the carbon footprint of those cupcakes.”

  Jessica chuckled. “It’s the thought that counts.”

  “Do thoughts have carbon footprints?”

  “I’ll try the cupcakes,” she said, and left the table.

  I had finished my pizza and was about to make my way to the desserts, when Donna appeared. She sat down beside me, took off her yellow baseball cap, and rubbed her face with her sun-browned hands.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. As I know from my own gardening experience, it’s always something. If it’s not rabbits in the lettuce, it’s vine borers on the squash or hornworms on the tomatoes. At least it hadn’t hailed in the past few days—but there’s always next week.

  “It’s Terry,” she said bleakly. “She still hasn’t shown up. Which means I still don’t have a truck.” She dropped her hands, her face hard, her mouth set. “When that woman gets back here, I am going to kill her. At the very least, I’m throwing her out. She can find someplace else to live. She can get her own vehicle, too, damn it.”

  I sat very still for a moment. “Remind me, Donna. When did Terry take off?”

  “Friday. Friday morning.” She sighed. “As in the day before yesterday.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “Are you kidding?” Donna shook her head. “Terry never tells me anything about anything. She’s always been that way. Secretive, I mean. Drives me crazy—especially because of . . . well, her criminal record. I keep imagining all kinds of things. Like, she’s off somewhere on a twoday high. Or she’s gone to Mexico, intending to smuggle in some pot. Or something worse.” She shuddered.

  I hesitated. “Do you have reason to suspect she’s out doing drugs somewhere?”

  “Well, maybe.” She sighed. “There were a couple of phone calls. Thursday night and early Friday morning—Terry wasn’t there. From some creepy-sounding guy—he wouldn’t give me his name or number. He said she’d know who he was.”

  “Did she return his call?”

  “Not so far as I know.” She paused, frowning. “Actually, she left right after I told her about that second call. She didn’t even stay for breakfast, which really hurt Aunt Velda’s feelings, because Auntie was making pancakes. She didn’t ask whether I needed the truck, either. She just took the keys off the peg in the kitchen and bugged out. Not a word about where she was going or when she’d be back.”

  I spoke very carefully. “If Terry left on Friday morning, that means she’s been gone for over forty-eight hours.” I calculated silently. “More like sixty hours, actually. Maybe you should report her missing.”

  “Missing?” She gave a short, brusque laugh. “Report Terry missing? That would mean the cops would be looking for her, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “That’s usually what happens when people go missing. The cops look for them. They find them, too.” Alive. Sometimes. But not always.

  “Terry would not want the cops looking for her,” Donna said definitively. “You know her. She tries to keep a very low profile. If I reported her missing, it wouldn’t be me killing her when she got home. It would be her killing me.”

  “I understand,” I said slowly. “But under the circumstances—”

  Donna spoke firmly, “I’m sorry, China, but there are no circumstances under the sun that would force me to ask the police to look for my sister. I’ll just have to wait until she decides to come home, that’s all.”

  I put my hand on her arm. I didn’t want to say this, but I had to. “Donna, there was a fire last night, in a trailer out on Limekiln Road. I was driving by and saw it and turned in the alarm.”

  She looked at me, her head tilted, her eyes curious. “Sounds bad. But what does it have to do with—”

  “A woman died in the fire. She couldn’t get out by herself because she’d been bound and shot. I didn’t get there in time to pull her out. Just as I was about to try, there was an explosion. The whole place went up.”

  “So?” she said, pulling her brown eyebrows together. “I mean, I’m sorry to hear it, but I don’t know why—”

  “The last I heard, they hadn’t identified the woman.”

  She understood then, and pulled in a shuddery breath. “And you’re thinking it might be—”

  “I am not thinking anything specifically,” I replied grimly, wishing I didn’t have to do this. “I just thought you might want to give Sheriff Blackwell a call. He may be able to—”

  But Donna had jammed her cap on her head, got up from the table, and was walking very fast toward the house. I didn’t go after her. This was something she was going to have to deal with herself.

  By the time I got to the dessert table, my cupcakes had disappeared, so their carbon footprints, whatever they were, were history. But by this time, I wasn’t very hungry, so I skipped dessert and sat down to listen to Stu’s presentation of the new book. It might have been very good, or maybe it wasn’t—either way, you couldn’t prove it by me. I’m sorry, but I wasn’t paying attention.

  I was thinking of the woman whose voice I had heard, the woman I couldn’t save. And wondering if it was Terry.

  Chapter Six

  Grown as an ornamental throughout the world, morning glory is a twining plant with bright blue, funnel-shaped flowers. Ololiuqui (pronounced oh-loh-LEE-ooh-kwee) was the name given to the seeds by the Aztecs, meaning “round things.” The seeds were used in rituals for their LSD-like effects, inducing primarily a dreamy state with heightened sensitivity to light and sound. . . . Today, the people of Oaxaca continue to use the seeds as a source of spiritual help in times of trouble.

  Chrissie Wildwood

  Mood Enhancing Plants

  The shops and the tearoom are closed on Monday. Being closed doesn’t mean that Ruby, Cass, and I don’t show up for work, of course. When you own your own small business, you never have a day off. It just means that we’re not waiting on customers. I usually spend Monday mornings in the gardens around the shop. Summer afternoons, when it’s often too warm to work outdoors, I co
me inside to make orders, do some bookkeeping, and dust the shelves. (I learned the importance of dust a long time ago. If the customers see dust on an item, they immediately assume that it’s been sitting on the shelf forever, forlorn and unwanted. They don’t want it, either.)

  This morning, I dropped Caitlin at her friend Alice’s house to spend the day and got to the shop about nine. Ruby and I had planned to go over the handout for our program on psychoactive plants, so we took my laptop to a table in the tearoom, along with a freshly brewed pot of rosemary tea. (Rosemary is one of those mood-altering herbs that has an uplifting, tonic effect, welcome when you’re working.) I had the feeling that the members of the Garden Club were going to be surprised by what they learned during our presentation, primarily because gardeners are a trusting lot. They don’t like to think that their favorite plants might have a dark side.

  Of course, there’s been so much media coverage of Salvia divinorum in the past few years that lots of people are aware that the plant is psychoactive. They may even have heard that you can get high on morning glory seeds. But they probably don’t suspect that their pretty, fallblooming Mexican marigold (Tagetes lucida) was used by the Aztecs to calm sacrificial victims before they were put to death in a violent, gruesome ritual. Gardeners might guess that tobacco is mood-altering, or they may know enough about datura’s psychoactive properties to warn the kids away from it. But wormwood? It has a dark side? Well, yes: this potent herb is the central ingredient in the notorious absinthe, which was reputed to be the downfall of the painter Toulouse Lautrec, among other imbibers of his generation.

  Or lemon balm, which grows in almost everybody’s herb garden. Chewed or brewed as a very strong tea, this mild-mannered herb is said to have a paradoxical effect, both calming and stimulating at the same time—lemon balm was an ingredient in absinthe, as well. And of course there’s catnip, which can be highly psychoactive, if you’re a cat with the right genes. If you’re not a cat, well, not so much, maybe, although some people claim to get a buzz from smoking it, especially when it’s mixed with tobacco.

  Ruby isn’t growing marijuana, of course, although we’ve included a photo of the plant and a paragraph about it in our handout. She’s not growing Poppy somniferum, either. It’s legal to possess poppy seeds (after all, they’re a necessary component of poppy seed rolls, which are a necessary component of some traditional Yuletide celebrations), but possession of the plant is a different matter entirely. The Opium Poppy Control Act of 1942 doesn’t discriminate between opium (a product made from the plant) and the opium poppy itself. Grow it—one plant or dozens—and you risk being charged with possession of a Level II narcotic. I didn’t think it was likely that Ruby would get busted, but we felt it was safer not to tempt Sheila and the PSPD. Instead, Ruby has planted prickly poppy (Argemone mexicana), which is native to Mexico but now widely naturalized in the United States. It was known to the Aztecs as “nourishment of the dead” and is also a hallucinogen. Unlike its notorious cousin, it’s entirely legal. Go figure.

  For refreshments, Ruby had been consulting with garden club members about what they wanted to bring. They had decided on food flavored with some of the plants we’d be talking about—not to get club members high, but to show them a few of the many ways we use mood-altering plants and to demonstrate that some of our favorite plants have a different side to their personalities.

  We don’t turn the telephones off just because the shops are closed, so our discussion was frequently punctuated by phone calls. The answering machines took most of the messages, but when I heard Donna’s voice on my machine, I got up and went to take the call. Ruby and I were finished, anyway. The program looked to be in good shape.

  Donna was phoning from her car. She had just left the sheriff’s office, and she wasn’t making any effort to mask her apprehension. The night before, after I told her about the woman who died in the trailer fire, she had gone straight to the phone and talked to the deputy on duty. He hadn’t been able to give her any more information about the identity of the victim, but he had asked her to come in this morning and take a look at the victim’s few effects. Naturally enough, she had spent a long, sleepless night filled with a terrible uncertainty, imagining the worst—especially because Terry had neither come home nor called.

  Unfortunately, Donna’s visit to the sheriff’s office had produced even more uncertainty. The victim’s body was too badly burned for any attempts at visual identification, and she hadn’t been allowed to see it. But she had been given some information about the gunshot wound and had been shown a shoe that had somehow escaped the flames, and a bracelet. The shoe, she thought, was similar to Terry’s sneakers, although she couldn’t be sure. It was the kind you could buy at Walmart, which meant that probably half the people in town owned a pair. She didn’t recognize the bracelet, either, a silver-colored link bracelet with a flat panel engraved with the initials G.G.

  And more uncertainty lay ahead. Terry’s dental records would be requested from the prison, where she’d had some dental work done, and at the deputy’s request, Donna had taken Terry’s hairbrush to the office. Both the dental records and the DNA match would take some time. In the meanwhile, she had been persuaded to list Terry as a missing person.

  “She’s going to be furious with me when she gets home,” Donna said. I could tell by her tone that she was trying to persuade herself that it wasn’t Terry who had burned to death in the trailer. As for me, well, I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t want to remember the voice I had heard crying out for help, but when I tried, I had to say that it hadn’t sounded much like Terry. But I had been panicked and the victim had been frantic, her voice unnaturally shrill and high-pitched. Yes, it could’ve been Terry.

  But I didn’t want to say that to Donna. Instead, I said, “How’s Aunt Velda handling this? What have you told her about the situation?”

  “She’s not so good,” Donna said glumly. “She’s had a bad cold for a couple of days—that’s why she wasn’t at the meeting last night. To make things worse, she overheard my conversation with the sheriff’s office last night, and I had to tell her about the trailer fire. She’s in bed today.”

  “In bed?” That wasn’t like Aunt Velda, who is one of the liveliest old ladies I know. I want to be just like her when I grow up. That is, I want to have her energy, although I’d just as soon skip her history of intergalactic space travel.

  “Yeah. This definitely isn’t good for her, China. It took a long time for her to recover from Terry’s being sent back to prison. This time . . .” Her voice sank, and I could hear the desperation in it. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Aunt Velda. That crazy old lady keeps me going when things get rough out here.”

  Sadly, there wasn’t much I could say. I made consoling noises and asked her to let me know as soon as she heard from her sister. Then I went to find my gardening trowel and headed out to the medicinal garden to do some serious weeding. I always think better with a trowel in my hand, and I had some serious thinking to do about Donna’s call.

  So now I was on my knees, weeding my way through the comfrey and wormwood and pondering the details that Donna had given me. I reflected on them as I dug up the tenacious root of a yellow dock that was intruding on the personal space of a bushy St. John’s wort, gaudy with sunshine-colored blooms.

  One was the bracelet. The fact that it didn’t bear Terry’s initials wasn’t highly relevant to the identification—it could have been a remembrance gift from a fellow prisoner or a pen pal friend. The other was the fact that the victim had been shot in the chest with a small-caliber handgun—a Saturday night special, a gun that’s cheap and easy to get. Which reinforced my sense that this had been a drug deal gone bad. Somebody trying to cheat somebody out of money. Somebody threatening to blow the whistle on somebody else. Somebody—

  I yanked at a bindweed that was choking the life out of a neighboring lavender plant. The possibilities were infinite. The information was scanty. There wasn’t enough evidence to dra
w any sort of conclusion. We’d have to wait for the DNA report or the dental records, both of which could take a while. But maybe Terry would come home before then and that part of the mystery, anyway, would be solved.

  And in the meantime, I reminded myself that—while I was deeply sympathetic to Donna’s plight—this really was not my problem, and there was no sense in stewing over it. I had lots of other things on my mind, including the fact that McQuaid would be away longer than he had planned. He’d called the night before to say that he had wrapped up the investigation in Memphis but he’d uncovered another angle, and Charlie Lipman wanted him to follow up. Instead of taking a plane home this morning, he was on his way to Knoxville. So Caitie and I would be batching it until Wednesday, at least. Too bad. We were ready for him to come home.

  “Hey, China.”

  I looked up, startled, squinting against the late-morning sun. “Oh, Jessica. Hi.”

  The intrepid girl reporter was wearing denim pants, a white blouse, and a red blazer, and carried a business-like leather bag over her shoulder. “I’ll bet you forgot,” she said in a tone that barely missed being accusing. “About our lunch, I mean.”

  “Oh, no,” I lied, and scrambled to my feet. “I just got busy and lost track of time.” But of course she was right. I had remembered our lunch date earlier that morning, but Donna’s call had driven it out of my mind.

  She hitched the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. “Why don’t we just go over to Beans’ and get something to eat? Unless you’ve already made sandwiches, that is.”

  “I haven’t,” I confessed. I brushed the dirt off my knees. “Beans’ is a great idea. The food is good, and we can sit in the back where there isn’t much noise. Let’s do it.”

  IF you’re looking for Beans’ Bar and Grill, you’ll find it in a tin-roofed stone building between Purley’s Tire Company and the MoPac railroad tracks, across the street from the Old Firehouse Dance Hall. It’s a Texas roadhouse of 1930s or ’40s vintage, with a pressed tin ceiling painted white, a worn wooden floor, an assemblage of mismatched tables and chairs, and an antique mirrored bar that runs the length of the main room. You can go to Beans’ to play pool, throw darts at posters of various politicos, sit at the bar and watch the Longhorns beat the bejeebers out of the Aggies on TV (or vice versa) while you pig out on a chickenfried steak smothered in Bob Godwin’s special cream gravy, with sides of deep-fried pickled jalapeños, beans, or coleslaw. You can also play “Boot-Scootin’ Boogie” on the old Wurlitzer jukebox or carve your initials on the wooden Indian that stands just inside the door. And when you’re ready to settle your tab, you can whistle for Bud, who will pick it up and take it to the cash register. Bud (short for Budweiser) has floppy yellow ears and wears a red bandana and a leather saddlebag with a side pocket for tips. He’s Bob Godwin’s golden retriever—so called, according to Bob, because he retrieves the gold.