Tiles and Tribulations Read online

  “I’m not sure they are Portuguese, dear. I’m only guessing at this point. But if you’d paid attention on our honeymoon, you might be able to help me with identification.”

  “I paid attention to the important stuff, didn’t I?” Greg gave my shoulders a squeeze.

  We’d honeymooned in Portugal. It was my idea; I’d always had a thing for that Iberian country. I’m not saying I believe in reincarnation, but if did, I’m sure I was Portuguese in a former life. At any rate, I did my homework well before the trip, and once there—when we weren’t in our romantic hotels, doing the romantic thing—I dragged my new husband to every museum, palace, and church I could squeeze into the agenda. And of course we did the antique shops.

  Many tourists head straight for the beaches of the Algarve, in the south, but both Greg and I found the mountaintop town of Sintra to be the most charming place we’d ever visited; we vowed to return someday for a month’s stay. Even busy Lisbon captivated us far more than we’d anticipated, and by the time we hit the National Museum of Azulejo in Lisbon, I too was dragging. But one step inside that fabulous museum, established in the sixteenth-century convent Madre de Deus, and I was energized.

  The Portuguese word for wall tile, azulejo, probably derives from the Arabic “az-zulaca,” meaning “brilliant surface,” and the museum is a veritable jewel box. While Greg slumbered on some thoughtfully placed benches, I gazed at the handiwork of Portugal’s finest artisans. I learned a little that day as well, but alas, not enough.

  “C.J.,” I said, “is it all right with you if I come back tomorrow and clean the entire batch?”

  “Don’t be silly, Abby, of course you may.”

  “And if I find a safe way,” I said pushing my luck, “may I clean that awful orange paint off the rest of them?”

  C.J. bit her lower lip. “I kind a like the orange. I was planning to paint pink stripes across it and—” She shook her massive head, and for a second I felt my hopes sink. But the big gal is a pragmatist and, above all, a keen businesswoman. “If you close the shop, Abby, I’ll help you strip the paint.”

  That was going a little too far. I didn’t have anything to gain if C.J.’s tiles turned out to be as valuable as I hoped. On the other hand, a closed shop meant lost revenue for me.

  “If it’s all the same,” I said, “I’d rather work alone. You see, I feel the need for solitude coming on.”

  “That’s because her ex-husband is in town,” my mini-madre explained to her compadres.

  “Mama!”

  “But it’s true, dear.” She turned to the others. “Buford Timberlake is the slime on the ooze on sludge on the muck at the bottom of the pond. I think that’s how she put it. Anyway, even though he’s the father of my grandchildren, I’d have to agree.”

  “Dirty linen,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “What’s that, dear?” Mama’s hearing ranges from perfect, to just above that of a stone, depending on her mood.

  “I think she doesn’t want you to air her dirty linens in public,” C.J. said in a voice loud enough to wake the dead two counties over. In her defense the girl was just trying to be helpful. Unfortunately she didn’t stop there. “Personally though, I could never see the harm in that. Why, my Granny Ledbetter up in Shelby made a fortune airing her dirty linens in public—well, she would have, except that somebody stole her sheets.”

  “That’s nice, dear,” Mama said. Like me, she’d heard one too many Shelby stories.

  The Heavenly Hustlers, however, were fresh meat. And when Chiz Bannock flexed his dimples at poor C.J. and asked for details—well, I would have aired my entire hamper on the Today Show under those circumstances.

  “You see,” C.J. explained, “it was back in the nineteen forties. Granny had just finished painting the house, and she’d used real sheets to catch the drips—not plastic drop sheets, on account of they didn’t have them in those days. Anyway, no sooner did Granny get done painting, when her milk cow, Clarabelle, went into labor. So Granny used the paint-splattered sheets to lay on the barn floor under the calf when it was born. Then, because they were already so dirty, she used them to kneel on in the vegetable garden when she was weeding. And just so y’all know, up in Shelby it isn’t like here, where the ground is sandy. Up there it’s all red clay, and it doesn’t come out of things, no matter how hard you scrub. Why, once when I was a little girl—”

  “C.J.,” I said gently, “can you please stick to the main story?”

  “No problemo, Abby. Where was I?”

  “I think you were trying to tell us how your granny’s dirty linen almost made her rich.”

  “Right. Well, try as she might Granny couldn’t get the sheets clean. Finally she gave up and just hung them out on the line to dry. Then later that same day this tourist stops by to ask directions to New York City. Now wasn’t that silly?”

  “That was pretty silly, dear,” Mama said agreeably. “As if your poor Granny would know.”

  “Oh, but she did. Granny knew five different ways to get there. I meant that it was silly the tourist didn’t know how to get there.”

  “The sheets,” I hissed. “Get back to the damn sheets.”

  “Yeah, right. Well, after the tourist left, Granny went back inside. But then later in the day, when it was fixing to rain, she went back out to get the sheets, only they were gone. A couple of months after that, Granny bought a magazine and inside there was a picture of this famous artist standing next to one of his paintings, and it was the same guy who’d asked Granny directions! And guess what? That wasn’t really his painting the guy was standing next to, but one of Granny’s sheets.”

  “That was very entertaining,” I said in an attempt to wrap things up. “So, how about it, C.J.? Is it okay if I work on the wall alone tomorrow?”

  “I guess so, Abby.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Wait a minute,” Chiz said. “You never told us who the artist was.” I wanted to slap the boy—gently, of course—dimples and all.

  C.J. giggled. “Well, his first name is the capital of Mississippi and his last name is a type of fish.”

  “Jackson Pollock did not steal your granny’s sheets!” I said irritably.

  I had more to say but, fortunately for both of us, Sergeant Scrubb’s cell phone rang. He returned to the cramped breakfast nook to take the call. When he emerged a few minutes later, he was frowning.

  “Greg, may I see you a minute?”

  “Sure,” my sweetie said, but when he took his first step in Scrubb’s direction, you can bet that the whole bunch of us surged forward with him, like an eight-headed beast.

  The detective held up a restraining hand and laughed. “Whoa. Okay, okay, I was going to tell you all the basics anyway, so I may as well do it all at once. That was my partner, Sergeant Bright, on the phone. He was calling from the Medical University of South Carolina.” Sergeant Scrubb swallowed. “Golda Feinstein, also known as Madame Woo-Woo, is dead.”

  “Oh my God!” Sondra Riffle looked genuinely upset.

  Her husband, Hugh, put his arm around her. “Did she die in the ambulance?”

  “If not,” I said, “I’m sure there are a lot of other ambulances in which folks have died. One of them might be for sale.”

  He gave me a blank stare.

  Thelma Maypole’s stare, on the other hand, was anything but blank. The orange light reflecting from the painted tiles, and further distorted by the weird lenses, made her irises look like freshly fanned coals. She fixed the embers on me.

  “If it really was a heart attack,” she said, “we know who is to blame.”

  “I didn’t do anything!” I wailed.

  “Yes you did, dear—” Mama clamped a hand over her meddling little mouth.

  “It wasn’t a heart attack,” Sergeant Scrubb said, with a shake of his head. No doubt he’d never seen a bigger bunch of babies outside a Pampers commercial. “I’m not free to—no, I’m not going to discuss the details now. But it wasn’t a heart attack.”


  “I get it—” I stopped. Greg was mouthing the words “shut up” to me.

  Ella Nolte pushed her way to the front of the pack. “Sergeant Scrubb, there is no need to play games with us. I am a professional writer of mystery novels, and I know what’s going on.”

  “Games!” C.J. said, clapping her hands with glee. “I just love games. Granny and I used to play one called Prussian Roulette.”

  Mama patted the big gal’s arm. “You mean Russian Roulette, don’t you dear?”

  “No, ma’am, I meant Prussian—well, German, at least. You see, Granny would make all these miniature strudels. Most of them she would fill with apple, but every now and then she’d hide a jalapeño in one of them. Then she would divide the pastries between us, and the game was to see who could eat all of theirs without making a face.”

  Ella Nolte rolled her beady eyes. “Mozella, your young friend here has almost enough imagination to be a writer herself. But even she hasn’t guessed what it is the Sergeant refuses to tell us.”

  “Then you tell us,” Mama said. She was practically begging.

  The pedantic pen pusher had the figure of a scarecrow built without straw. Nonetheless, she thrust her scrawny chest skyward in a proud gesture and poked the air with a bony finger.

  “What he’s not telling you is that Madame Woo-Woo was murdered here tonight, and we are all suspects.”

  7

  We all stared at Sergeant Scrubb.

  “Is that true?” I asked. To my credit I remained as calm as Charleston Harbor on those days Greg and I decide to go sailing.

  Sergeant Scrubb, on the other hand, could have zipped out of the harbor without tacking once. “I said nothing about murder. I merely said it wasn’t a heart attack.”

  “Oh my God.” Ella Norte clapped both hands to her sunken cheeks in an act of pure melodrama. “Madame Woo-Woo was poisoned!”

  Sergeant Scrubb started. “How did you know that, ma’am?”

  Ella let loose with one of her snorts. “Well, it’s not because I’m the guilty party, if that’s what you’re thinking. But there was food served tonight, wasn’t there?”

  The strange orange light seemed to go out in Thelma Maypole’s eyes. She hugged her ample abdomen, as if she might suddenly be experiencing pain.

  “Is something wrong, Miss Maypole?” Sergeant Scrubb asked. He didn’t seem unduly concerned.

  Thelma looked accusingly, first at C.J., and then at me. “We could all be dying, couldn’t we?”

  “In a way we all are,” I said. “Life is a terminal disease, is it not?”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.” She unwrapped one beefy arm from her middle long enough to point a sausage finger at me. “Mozella Wiggins’s daughter—Abigail, I think her name is—played a nasty trick on that poor medium.”

  Hugh Riffle moved into position, like a linebacker waiting for the referee’s whistle. “What sort of nasty trick?”

  It was time for me to step up to the scrimmage line. “Madame Woo-Woo had rigged a recorder under the table. Her intent was to get money out of y’all. I merely made that more difficult.”

  Hugh blinked. “You mean that wasn’t a ghost we heard?”

  “Bingo.”

  Ella Nolte snorted again. If she wasn’t careful, one of the many carriage tour companies that does business in Charleston’s historic district was going to harness that woman and put her to work. Think of the money they’d save, because no doubt Ella could pull the wagon and deliver the lecture.

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I felt chills run up and down my arms when the ghost spoke.”

  “That was probably just C.J.’s air-conditioner. You were sitting under a vent.”

  “I think all of you are missing the point,” Sondra Riffle said. She had the soft sort of voice one might expect from a former, and very much faded, beauty queen. Perhaps because of that, and because she rarely spoke, we paid her our full attention. “Whatever it is that killed Madame Woo-Woo could be killing us right now, only more slowly. Shouldn’t we be at the hospital?”

  “Why, that was precisely my point.” Thelma Maypole clutched her stomach even tighter.

  “I’ll call 911,” Mama said brightly. She’s always up for a bit of excitement, which is probably why she hooked up with this lively bunch.

  “Don’t be silly,” C.J. said. “911 is standing right there.” She nodded at Sergeant Scrubb.

  The sergeant, meanwhile, seemed curiously unconcerned. “Why don’t we just drive over?”

  “I’ve got room in my car for six,” Chiz Banncock volunteered.

  “Better make that fast,” Ella Nolte grunted. She wrapped her beanpole arms around her nonexistent middle and doubled over in a gesture of pure agony.

  “Ella,” Sondra said softly. “Are you all right?”

  “Hell no! I think I’m going to die.” The queen of melodrama staggered over to a kitchen stool, tried to sit, but slid to the floor instead. Her bony frame barely even made a thump.

  “Get a goddamn ambulance!” Hugh Riffle roared. His hands now cradled his rather prodigious belly. His normally florid face was the color of skim milk.

  “Greg,” Sergeant Scrubb said calmly. “May I see you for a minute?”

  I took a step in that direction.

  “Alone,” Sergeant Scrubb said, not quite as calm.

  While my dearly beloved trotted off for a tête-à-tête with Charleston’s finest, the rest of us fell like flies. Both Hugh Riffle and Thelma Maypole made respectable thuds when they hit the hard floor. Dr. Francis Lloyd Whipperspoonbill was too much of an aristocrat to actually go supine, but instead took Ella’s stool, where he perched, looking as miserable as an owl in a two-day rain. Chiz, who was both an aristocrat and a studmuffin, managed to hoist himself up on a kitchen counter. There the hunk sat, hunkered over, his face in his hands.

  Aging beauty queens, I soon learned by watching Sondra Riffle, lower themselves to the linoleum with grace. Once there, they arrange their clothing in a seductive fashion, fluff their hair with pastel pink nails, and then lay their store-bought cheekbones gently across bronzed arms.

  That left just Mama, C.J., and me standing; the three people I cared most about in that room. For a few seconds, as we stood there staring at the victims, and then each other, I felt relieved. Somehow we’d managed to escape the grim reaper. How optimistic of me.

  “Ooh,” C.J. started to moan. “Ooh, ooh. I think I’m going to die.”

  “Join the crowd,” Ella whinnied from her position on the floor.

  C.J. wasted no time accepting the invitation. Never a gentle giant, she threw her five foot, ten inch frame down like it was a sleeping bag and she was preparing for a sleepover.

  Even my mini-madre was teetering around in tight circles, in what little free floor space there was. In her hoop skirt she looked like a bowling pin trying to decide if it had been knocked down.

  “Mama! Not you, too!”

  “I know you think I love your brother Toy more than you, but that isn’t so. I always loved you best, dear.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course—well, except maybe for the year you turned fourteen. You were an absolute brat.”

  “Sorry, Mama.”

  “Don’t worry, dear, I forgave you long ago. I want you to promise me one thing though.”

  “Anything, Mama!” I had yet to feel a single pang.

  “Promise you’ll bury me with my pearls on. And I want to be buried in that pink and white gingham dress your daddy loved so much. And those new white pumps I bought just for your wedding.”

  “I promise,” I wailed.

  Mama steadied herself to look me in the eyes one last time. “Anything you want to say, dear?”

  “I love you.”

  “Anything else?”

  I gulped. “It was me who broke that blue carnival glass dish you kept on the coffee table when Toy and I were kids. I blamed it on him because he wouldn’t let me ride shotgun with you whe
n we drove to the beach.”

  “And I have sinned against you as well, Mozella.”

  C.J. has a pleasant enough voice under normal circumstances, but now she sounded like a bullfrog on steroids.

  Mama remained stable long enough to demand that her friend elaborate.

  “Remember that time we drove up to Cherokee, North Carolina, to gamble in the casinos?”

  “What about it?”

  “Remember when you asked me to guard your bucket of chips while you went to the bathroom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Remember how when you returned from the bathroom, there didn’t seem to be as many chips in the bucket as when you left?”

  “You’re forgiven, dear,” Mama said to our prostrate hostess. She turned to me. “That blue dish was my mama’s, Abby. It was the only thing of hers I had.”

  “Sorry!”

  “I guess sorry will have to do—under the circumstances. Well, good-bye, dear.” Mama closed her eyes and began a slow slump. One by one the hoops in her skirt collapsed, until she was in a sitting position. Then with a deft flip she reoriented the hoops in a vertical position while she lay back on the floor. The effect was that I could see up Mama’s skirts.

  I gasped. My mother was wearing pants! Blue jeans to be exact. And what’s more, they seemed to fit, which meant they couldn’t be mine. How could that be? The woman had never worn pants a day in her life. Even when we climbed Crowder’s Mountain, a rocky peak to the west of Charlotte, she’d worn a skirt—with crinolines!

  “Mama!” I cried. “Where did you get those jeans?”

  She raised her petite gray head and opened one eye. “At the Gap, dear. Where else?”

  “But you never—” I grabbed my side. It suddenly felt like I had a moray eel swimming up my small intestine. I hadn’t felt such excruciating pain since giving birth to my daughter Susan. With my son, Charlie, you can bet I used an epidural.

  “Abby!” Greg strode back into the kitchen just as my knees buckled. His strong hands grabbed me and stood me back on my feet. The second he let go of me, I collapsed again.

  “Good-bye, darling,” I murmured, as I sank into a heap of hoops and hemlines. “I love you.”