Hung Out to Dry: The Misadventures of the Laundry Hag, #4

by Jennifer L. Hart

  “You’re mean,” he informed me.

  “You should have thought about that before you rapped on our window in the middle of the freaking night.”

  Reluctantly, Marty got off the foldout and together the two of us stuffed the mattress back in the couch, put the cushions on, and settled the ratty slipcover in place. Atlas leaped up, circled three times and then curled up on the left side. He took up two entire cushions so Marty and I moved into the kitchen.

  “Okay, look, you know you’re welcome to stay here whenever you need to.” Even though he had a camper parked on the street between the houses. Of course, the camper didn’t have a toilet that flushed or running water. “You have to admit, your situation has been kind of volatile lately and I’m just trying to help. Talk to me, Marty.”

  Marty shrugged, the gesture full of helplessness. “I swear, Maggie, I don’t know what’s going on. She’s either yelling at me or sobbing and I don’t know why.”

  “Did you ask her what’s wrong?” I prompted.

  Marty gave me a level look. “I’m not stupid you know.”

  I pasted what I hoped was a bland expression in place. “Never said you were, Sprout.”

  My brother scowled into the depths of his coffee cup. “Whatever it is, it has something to do with Mae. Like yesterday, she just dropped her off over here and then went home. I came back from work and found her sitting in the dark. Not doing anything, just sitting there. I asked her where Mae was and she nearly took my head off. Then she left. I came here and got Mae and fed her a bottle when Penny didn’t come back. She got in at three in the morning and she seemed like she wanted to…well, you know.” Heat scaled my brother’s face.

  I cleared my throat and rasped, “And did you?”

  Marty couldn’t meet my gaze. “Not right away. I tried to ask her where she’d been. She didn’t smell like alcohol or anything so I didn’t think she’d been drinking. So we started to fool around. Then all of a sudden she started screaming and crying. I tried to calm her down but she wouldn’t. I mean, she was just so out of control. Sylvia actually came into the house to make sure everything was okay. And that’s when Penny told me to go and not to come back.”

  The hairs rose on the back of my neck and though I couldn’t see him, I felt Neil’s presence behind me.

  “Do you think she might have postpartum depression?” I asked. The mood swings, the screaming rages, the tears. There was something going on with Penny and though I’d never been through the aftermath of childbirth, I’d seen some of the warning signs before.

  “I don’t know,” Marty said helplessly. “There’s something not right.”

  Neil had come forward and put a hand on my shoulder. “Marty, call Penny’s doctor and tell him what’s been going on. He might want to see her. Maggie, go over there and offer to take the baby for the day. She shouldn’t be left alone with Penny until we know more.”

  “Sylvia and I have to go back to Sarah Dale’s today at noon,” I said. “If Marty has to take Penny to the doctor, who’ll watch Mae?”

  “Hmm, I think Mac is in class all day today.” Neil drummed his fingers against his leg and then paused. “I’ll call my mom and ask her to babysit.”

  My eyebrows rose. “Your mother? You can’t be serious.”

  Neil frowned. “I turned out okay.”

  I wanted to say, no thanks to her, but really, what was the alternative? I was almost certain my mother-in-law didn’t eat infants alive.

  Not very often anyway.

  In the end, it was Marty who ended up tagging along with me to the Dale estate, mostly because he was afraid of upsetting Penny any more. Sylvia had offered to bring her to the doctor and Laura Phillips was left in charge of Mae, Josh, and Kenny.

  “God help them,” I murmured to Neil on the phone.

  “She’ll have them whipped into shape in no time,” Neil assured me.

  The whipped part I could imagine. I disconnected the call and sent my worried brother my most reassuring smile. He turned to stare out the window.

  The sky was dark and ominous, the clouds swollen and threatening rain at any moment. Neither Marty nor I tried to make conversation. He flipped idly through radio stations while I drove.

  Though I’d wondered what Sarah would think when I dragged yet another stranger into her home she took it in stride. “I figured you’d need someone to help you with the bigger pieces of furniture in the office. We have the first of the scheduled donation trucks coming on Monday and we can store anything we want to get out of the way in the shed.”

  I spent the first hour and a half assembling boxes while Marty went through the dry goods pantry.

  “So, what do you want me to pitch?” He asked as he picked up a can of baked beans.

  “Anything that looks rusted, doesn’t have a label or dates before the Bush Administration.”

  “Which one?” Marty asked.

  “The first one. Many canned goods start turning after the first two decades. That’s why you should always check the date when you buy them.”

  “Good to know.” Marty tossed the beans into a trash bag.

  “Maggie?” Sarah called out.

  I poked my head around the corner. “What’s up?”

  She bit her lip, obviously embarrassed. “I was wondering if you would drive me out to Shady Elm. I want to talk to Mr. Finn’s grandfather but I don’t want to go alone.”

  “Sure thing,” I said. At this rate, we’d never get through all the clutter in the house, but I figured Sarah needed a break and I was curious about the elder Mr. Finn.

  “I can stay and keep working,” Marty muttered. “I’m not fit for company right now.”

  Normally I would have done my mother hen routine, made sure he was really going to work, not play fruit ninja on his phone, but he hadn’t even checked the display once.

  “Call if you need anything,” I said.

  Sarah and I piled into my Mini and headed east. As far as retirement homes went, Shady Elm was a cut above some others I’d seen. Probably my greatest fear, after snakes and being buried alive, was the terror at the thought of being dumped in a state-run facility where I’d be fed gruel and left sitting in my own waste for days on end. Another argument in favor of having a baby, better odds that someone would take care of me when I was old and gray. Well, grayer.

  I parked on a sloping hill and we went in through the nearest door. There were three men gathered around a card table in the room we entered. The first had tufts of white hair sprouting from his liver-spotted dome and wore glasses so thick that I couldn’t make out his eye color. The second had a full head of gray hair and rheumy eyes like an aging basset hound. The last sat in a wheelchair. He was younger-looking than the other two and he glared at us. “Who the hell are you?”

  Sarah took a step back, obviously unsure of how to respond to such blatant hostility. I smiled and said. “I’m Maggie, and this is my friend, Sarah Dale.”

  “Dale?” The guy with the basset hound eyes studied her over. “Any relation to Chester Dale?”

  “Um, Yes?” Sarah didn’t sound quite sure of herself. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m his granddaughter.”

  A smile split his wizened face as he looked to his two cohorts. “Oh hot damn, it’s the psychic girl.”

  A woman wearing pink scrubs popped her head into the room. “Everything all right in here?”

  “Bugger off,” the man with the liver spots snarled.

  She rolled her eyes heavenward as though praying for patience and then looked at Sarah and I. “Who are you here to see?”

  “Uh,” Sarah blinked as though the woman had asked her the square root of 137. “Well, that is…um….”

  “This is Sarah Dale. Her grandfather, Chester, used to come here and play poker on Thursday with Mr. Finn.”

  “I’m Aloysius Finn,” the man in the wheelchair piped up. “Did my good for nothin’ grandson finally get off his dead ass and come see you then?”

  Cranky
old codgers, weren’t they? If it’d been my rodeo, I would have given as good as I got, but this was Sarah’s fact-finding mission.

  “Yes, um he did.” Sarah murmured.

  “He was very polite,” I added.

  “Even a broken clock’s right twice a day,” Aloysius grumbled.

  The nurse, seeing that we weren’t there to kidnap or maim the residents gave us a nod, mouthed good luck and scurried off.

  “We got the place to ourselves as everyone else is still at lunch. This here’s Bartholomew Grayson, but we call him Bert.” Aloysius introduced the man with the liver-spotted scalp. “And that sly son of a bitch is Charles Peter Randall the third.”

  “You should see what the first two look like,” Charles crowed.

  “Sit down, sit down.” Aloysius waved to a stack of uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs propped in the corner. “We’ve been hoping to meet you for a long time, Sarah.”

  “We’re so sorry to hear about your grandpappy,” Bert said. He had a trace of a southern accent, although his was more Appalachia than my flatlander drawl.

  Charles the third nodded in agreement. “He was a mighty fine man. And a good friend.”

  I wondered why, if they had been such good friends, Chester Dale had never even mentioned them to Sarah.

  “So you got the sight, just like your mother.” Aloysius studied her face.

  “You knew my mother?” Sarah’s eyes went wide.

  “Oh yes, we’ve been friends for years, since the war.” Charles puffed out his chest proudly.

  “That’ll be World War II,” Bert added. “We were part of one of the last units deployed overseas. Lucky for us, it wasn’t long ‘til they dropped the bomb and ended the whole dag burn thing.”

  “Wow,” I said, truly impressed.

  Sarah appeared stunned. “Gramps never told me he went to war. I thought he was too young.”

  “He lied,” Aloysius grinned like the Cheshire cat. “He was only sixteen. But seeing how he was big for his age, he fudged his papers and told everybody he was of age.”

  “It’s a damn shame,” Charles said. “I always thought he’d be the last of us standing.”

  “Well he would have been,” Aloysius stated in a matter of fact way, “If he hadn’t been murdered.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Did they really think that Chester Dale had been murdered?” Sylvia’s big blue eyes had gotten even bigger when she’d heard about our ill-fated trip to Shady Elm. “Why?”

  We were sitting on my front porch. Neil was on carpool duty with Mrs. Thomas up the road and Marty and Laura were inside with Mae. My feet ached from another day of industrial-strength cleaning and sorting and I’d kicked my sneakers off and propped my feet up on the railing. What I really wanted was a soak in the bathtub but I’d have to creep past my mother-in-law to do it. I’d managed to avoid her thus far—no sense pushing my luck. “They didn’t say, at least Aloysius didn’t give a reason. But they all seemed to think someone somewhere had a reason to kill Chester Dale.”

  “And you don’t think they could be right?” Sylvia asked.

  I shook my head. “No and I’m sorry I brought Sarah there. The last thing she needed was to hear their wild, unsupported theories. She was so upset, she went right to her room and I didn’t see her again before Marty and I left. Now, tell me about Penny.”

  Though Sylvia looked like she wanted to ask more about the possible murder, she said, “The doctor didn’t tell me anything of course, but I was doing a little reading online and blood tests often indicate if Omega 3s are very low, it’s often a sign of postpartum. If I had known, I would have insisted she take fish oil pills. You know, fatty acids are good for all sorts—”

  I interrupted before she could lecture me about my own deficiencies. “So, what are they going to do for her?”

  “Her doctor admitted her to the hospital, probably to try to stabilize her hormone levels. She didn’t fight him on it, she didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on. But the doctor did warn me that even after she comes home, she shouldn’t be left alone with Mae and we’ll need to watch her for further signs of depression. Women suffering from postpartum are capable of almost anything.”

  I closed my eyes and laid my head back against the glider. So my brother now had to deal with not only an infant but also her chemically imbalanced mother. I wondered if he was up to it. A year ago I never would have dreamed he could handle such responsibility and I was still worried he’d crack under the pressure. There were times when I looked at Marty and still saw the gangly teenager he’d been when I’d become his primary caregiver.

  As if reading my thoughts, Sylvia reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “They aren’t alone. We have a tremendous support network here to help them. They’ll make it through this. You know, I can help more, maybe not with the baby but I can teach Penny yoga and go shopping with her. Even for non-vegans, if you stick to the outer rim of the grocery store, you get all your essential vitamins and minerals without the processed garbage.”

  I opened one eye. “Thanks, but they keep the cleaning products in the center aisle so I’ll have to go there sometimes, so no, I’ll leave rimming the grocery store to someone else.”

  She was a woman on a mission and the joke went right over her head. “You could go green. Lemon and white vinegar and baking soda are as effective as bleach or Lysol and much less hazardous to everyone’s health.”

  The other lid lifted and I sat up. Was there any way to phrase my thoughts without sounding like a total lunatic? “Sylvie, you know I love you but if you try to take my Lysol, I’ll cut a bitch.”

  Guess not.

  “Message received,” she grumbled.

  We looked at each other and cracked up.

  There was a sound of a slamming door and my mother-in-law stood there staring. “Are you two having some sort of fit?” She asked with one eyebrow arched, the perfect picture of disdain.

  I sucked in some air and wheezed, “No.”

  Laura sniffed indignantly. “I need to get going. Now about Ralph’s retirement celebration next weekend—”

  “Retirement?” I interrupted. This was the first I’d heard a word about it. “Ralph’s retiring? Since when?”

  Laura narrowed her hazel green eyes on me. “I told you last month.”

  “No, you didn’t.” The thought of my father-in-law hanging up his lawyer’s hat and kicking back was absurd.

  “Yes, I did,” Laura said with mock patience. “And it’s a big deal to him that his family makes an appearance.”

  “Is everything all right?” I asked, wondering if Ralph was under doctor’s orders to take it easy and see to his health.

  “Fine, dear. Everything is just fine. Now, the occasion is only semi-formal, but for the love of God, don’t let my son wear one of his profane T-shirts under his suit jacket. He’s a grown man and he should behave as such.”

  I was still stuck on the whole ‘Ralph is retiring’ thing. “So, what’s he going to do then?”

  “Wear a proper button-down shirt, of course.” Laura scowled at me as though I were a few crayons shy of a box. And had possibly been eating them.

  “Not Neil, Ralph. What is he going to do with his time if he isn’t working?”

  Laura waved the matter off as if it was no biggie. “Whatever catches his fancy, I suppose. Now, it’s next Saturday at the Grand. Four o’clock. No gifts, we’re asking that all donations be made out to Ralph’s favorite charities. There’s a list attached to the e-vite. I’ll have Leo resend it as I suppose you deleted the first one as junk mail.” The last was said as though it was a major inconvenience.

  “Leo knows about this?” I squeaked.

  Sylvia’s head was turning back and forth between the two of us as though she was watching a tennis match. Wisely, she stayed on the sidelines.

  Laura stared at me, her eyebrows pulled as close together as her Botox treatment allowed. “Of course he knows, he’s been planning the whole event.
”

  Just then my Mini pulled into the driveway and the Phillips men tumbled out like the first wave in a clown car rehearsal.

  “Neil,” Laura called out, her eyes never leaving my face. “I think your wife’s been drinking.”

  “Again?” Neil deadpanned as he came up the steps. “I locked the liquor cabinet and everything, but she’s wily.”

  I shot him a poisonous glare.

  “See that it doesn’t become a problem, dear.” Laura murmured and then strode down to her BMW trailing a wake of expensive perfume and indignation.

  “You,” I said to my grinning husband, “Had better get someone to taste your food for the next month. And how the hell come you didn’t tell me your father’s retiring?”

  “He’s not retiring,” Neil spoke with certainty.

  “Well he’s having a retirement party and we’re supposed to make a cameo.”

  “It’s just for show. He’s done it a few times before, back when we were in Virginia. It’s an excuse to throw a party and celebrate his career.”

  “So can we skip it, then?” I asked hopefully. We already had more than enough going on without playing dress up for such a charade.

  Neil grimaced. “’ Fraid not, I told her we’d go.”

  “Why?”

  He cleared his throat. “You remember that hotel room we never got around to using? This was the price of it.”

  I blew out a sigh. “I don’t suppose you could explain to her that we didn’t actually use it and she’d let us off the hook.”

  Neil smiled and dropped a kiss on my forehead. “You’re cute when you’re being naive.”

  “Mom,” Josh had run inside but now appeared back on the porch, in full kvetching mode. “There’s nothing to eat here.”

  I rolled my eyes so hard one of them almost got stuck. There was plenty to eat, but in a classic preteen maneuver, Josh had taken one drive-by look, seen that there wasn’t anything readymade, and come straight to me to gripe. “I’ll make dinner right now, while you go shower.”

  He did his obligatory complaining, all of which I ignored. Finally, he stomped off to clean himself. Sylvia had yet another date to get ready for and she rose from her seat. “Are we going back to Sarah’s tomorrow?”