The Glass Is Always Greener Page 6

  “Oy vey,” I said. “What are we going to do with the big galoot?”

  “Love her; that’s all we can do. She’s not dangerous, and she can clearly function on her own. What is her IQ anyway?”

  “One sixty-five. I think that’s part of her problem. It’s kind of lonely up there at the top, so she invents these stories to amuse herself.”

  “Speaking of stories, dear, you’ll never guess what the latest one is that’s making the rounds.”

  “That I took an emerald ring off a dead woman?”

  Mama wears a string of pearls given to her by Daddy decades ago. She has never removed them—not once. Not even to shower. The fact that the gems look as splendid as they did the day that Daddy lifted them from the blue velvet box and hung them around Mama’s alabaster neck, is, in my humble opinion, every bit as miraculous as the images of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus that appeared on Grace Wilder’s cornbread when she took it from the oven on the stroke of midnight, December 24, 1966.

  At any rate, when Mama gets agitated she pats her pearls. When she’s very excited she twirls them. Until then, I had never seen her stroke them like one would stroke a kitten.

  “Mama, what’s wrong?”

  “That’s exactly it, Abby; that’s the story.”

  “So how did you hear?”

  “That awful Mrs. Goldburg. She called the hotel just before we left. She said to tell you that unless you give it back, she’s going to call the police.”

  “So let her. Of course she won’t; she already made that threat to me. Besides I didn’t take it.” I shuddered. “Mama, that would be macabre; removing something from the finger of a dead woman.”

  “Shhh, dear.”

  Oops. She’d been right to shush me. In my agitation—lacking pearls to pat—I’d spoken far too loudly. Apparently nothing pulls in an audience quite as well in a coffee shop as talk of robbing the dead. One of the keyboard pounders actually changed seats, moving to the one just behind me. Either he really was a novelist in need of a plot, or I was being followed.

  “And then I put the bomb inside a frozen turkey,” I said, “which I shipped by Bactrian camel to his summer house in Uzbekistan.”

  Mama’s fingers tapped a rapid rhythm on her mollusk secretions. “Abby, honey, you’re not making a lick of sense.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Behind me,” I mouthed. “What’s up with the guy sitting behind me?”

  Mama sighed. “Maybe Toy was right; I do need to get my hearing checked. First you practically break my eardrums, and now I can’t even hear you. I used to think I’d be a good lip-reader, but I can cross that off my list of accomplishments; I mean surely you wouldn’t prattle on about the gentleman sitting behind you.”

  “Mama!”

  “Now I hear that; nice and loud too.”

  “I give up.”

  “Please don’t,” the man behind me said. “If you do, my story will be too short.”

  I stood, which frankly doesn’t make me a whole lot taller than when I’m sitting; it certainly doesn’t make me more imposing. “What story? Are you from the Charlotte Observer?”

  Chapter 7

  Oh no, ma’am. I’m taking a creative writing class and my assignment was to listen to some dialogue in a public place and to use it in a story of my own. You and your sister were da bomb.”

  “She’s not my sister; she’s my mother! And the bomb is in the turkey, for crying out loud.”

  “It’s an honest mistake, young man,” Mama said, as she went from patting her pearls to patting her hair. Trust me; I was never going to hear the end of this.

  I took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and held it out to the young man. He was about the age of my son, Charlie, which made him perhaps twenty.

  “Here,” I said, “take this. It might help move dialogue along—like back to the table where you started.”

  The kid remained seated. His eyes were uncomprehending; I may as well have been speaking Cantonese.

  “Abby,” Mama whispered, “I don’t think that money talks as loud as it used to.”

  I pulled out another twenty, followed by a ten. “Either you take a hike now, junior, or we do.”

  He was a good Southern boy. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, before skedaddling.

  “Who was that young stud muffin?”

  I looked up from my café latte to see a strange woman with familiar eyes standing inside my comfort zone. Even worse, after brazenly bumping my shoulder with her hips, she slid into the booth next to me.

  “Excusez-moi,” I said, “but have we met?”

  “Abby, it’s me!”

  “Wynnell? B-but you have two eyebrows!”

  “I know,” Mama purred, “doesn’t she look fabulous? I was lying about the lip wax.”

  “Is that what you said, Mozella? And you believed that, Abby? I don’t have a mustache, do I?”

  “Of course not, dear.” The fact that, upon occasion, I’ve had to reach over and whisk the crumbs off my dear friend’s face was not relevant at the moment. What mattered was that her feelings not be hurt.

  “It hurt like the dickens,” Wynnell said. “I don’t think I’ll have it done again.”

  “But you look like a movie star,” I said. “Really.”

  “Oh Abby, you really should stop lying. With your height, someone with a nose that long will not look in proportion.” She glanced around. “Ahem—speaking of truth stretching, where is the maestro?”

  “She’s in the ladies’ room answering a call of distress.”

  “Serves her right; I told her that eating the entire ‘blooming onion’ by herself was not such a good idea.”

  Mama sighed wearily. “No, it’s— Oh, there she is. C.J., darling, I was about to send a plumber in there after you.”

  “That was sweet of you, Mozella,” C.J. said, and slid in next to Mama, “but I’m too big to be flushed down a toilet.” Enormous tears suddenly filled her eyes and shook her gargantuan head slowly from side to side. “If only the same could be said for poor Cousin Theopolous Ledbetter. He was as thin as a rail, so thin, in fact, that if you looked at him from above you might mistake him for a crack in the sidewalk. One day he rode his mule into town, to one of those stores where the toilets have the automatic flushing.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Poor Cousin Theopolous got flushed down the toilet and was never heard from again.”

  My former sister-in-law and current very dear friend turned her wounded eyes on me. “You don’t need to be so rude, Abby. Besides, you’re wrong; he did turn up again. He turned up in a sewer in Flushing, New York. That’s how the town got its name.”

  “Ah,” the three of us said.

  “You guys don’t believe me, do you?”

  We nodded this way and that, neither confirming nor denying anything. Since our response was all too familiar, C.J. wisely let it go.

  “I called that number in the stall,” she said. “It was for Domino’s Pizza. Can you believe someone would pull a prank like that?”

  “Yes,” we all said in concert again.

  This time the big gal bristled. “Don’t think I’m naive, ladies, because I’m not. Granny Ledbetter didn’t raise any fools. I saw right through Uncle Rufus Ledbetter’s scheme to get investors for the Trans-Atlantic Tunnel Project. New York to Paris in three days by car, he said. Underwater hotels. Every room would offer a fantastic opportunity for viewing deep-sea life.”

  “It sounds great,” Wynnell said, “if you’re not claustrophobic.”

  “It might have been a good idea at one time,” Mama said sadly. “But nowadays—with the threat of terrorism—I wouldn’t want to be stuck at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “I wouldn’t either,” I said. “And I’m sure you saw the drawbacks, C.J., which is why I want you on my team.”

  “Teams,” Mama said. “Are we going to play games?”

  “That’s exactly right, and it’s going to be you and Wynnell and against C.J. and me.”

&nbs
p; “Ooh,” C.J. cooed. “I love it when Abby gets like this.”

  “I’m trying to frown,” Wynnell said, “but I can’t feel my brow scrunch up. Having two brows is for the birds.”

  “It’s very becoming,” I said. “Isn’t it, ladies?”

  “I liked the unibrow better,” C.J. said. “It was more—uh—distinctive. Now you’re actually kind of pretty.”

  “Beautiful, in fact,” I said.

  “Mozella, you see what you did?” Wynnell cried accusingly. “You made me beautiful! Now, if I’m not careful, I might get prideful; all on account of you.”

  Wynnell’s outburst got the attention of everyone in the coffee shop. Their stares made my dear friend all the more uncomfortable. As usual, it was time for me to step in.

  I jumped on the banquette. “Please, folks,” I said, waving my arms, “can’t you see this woman is distressed. The poor woman has just found out she’s the inadvertent mother of Sarah Palin. Let’s give her some privacy, shall we?”

  “Oh come on,” a beefy man in khaki shorts and wife-beater T-shirt said. “That’s a bunch of bull.”

  “It is not,” I said. “Wynnell, what is the capital of Africa?”

  Wynnell is a staunch Republican and we have agreed never to discuss politics. However, if there is one thing she can’t stand, it’s a fat man in a wife-beater T-shirt butting into her business.

  “The capital of Africa is Nairobi,” she said, utterly deadpan.

  “You see?” I said. “Now leave her alone, y’all.”

  I slid back into the booth. “Okay, gals, where were we?”

  “The game,” Mama said. “Do we need a deck of cards?” She reached into her handbag and pulled out two pill cases, a battery-powered fan, three pairs of drugstore reading glasses, a six-inch bust of Nefertiti, an oversized Christmas card, and a Portuguese language thesaurus. But no deck of playing cards.

  “Mama, why so many pairs of glasses?”

  “Frankly, dear, I’m too lazy to check, and since I’d rather be safe than sorry, I throw an extra pair in.”

  “Gotcha. And no, we don’t need cards. The game is solving a murder.”

  Everyone groaned.

  “Okay, so y’all have been there, done that; but this time it’s different. We’re working in two teams, and we’re going to solve it in eight hours. It is now ten o’clock—give or take a couple of minutes, at least by that the clock on the wall—and by six o’clock tonight, we’ll have this case cracked.”

  “Can we go to dinner then and celebrate?” Mama said. She’s always concerned that I’m not eating enough—well, that’s when she isn’t concerned that I’m eating too much.

  “What makes you think we can crack this case if the police haven’t so far?” Wynnell said.

  “The murder only happened yesterday,” I said. “By the way, you scowl much better with the unibrow; I vote that you grow it back.”

  “Hear, hear,” the others said in unison.

  “So anyway, here are the players, guys.” I proceeded to tell them everything I knew about the Ovumkoph family, naming Ben, Aaron, Melissa, Sam, Tina, and Chanti as possible suspects. I didn’t mention Rob, because I knew he was on all of our minds anyway, and because we all loved him, and most of all, it would have been a betrayal to even breathe his name in that context.

  “Okay, so we have the suspects,” Mama said. She’d been taking careful but microscopic notes on the back of the Christmas card. “Now we need a motive.”

  “What about humiliation?” Wynnell said.

  “Rob’s Aunt Jerry was just telling it like she saw it,” I said. It was amazing, but here I was feeling protective of a dead woman’s reputation, and I’d only known her for a few minutes. Strictly speaking, make that a few seconds.

  “Then the motive has to be greed,” C.J. said. “Everybody wanted more than their share, and they felt—Mozella, Abby, close your ears—stiffed.”

  “And I feel annoyed. C.J., first of all, I heard that. Second, how does one close their ears? And third, why didn’t Wynnell have to close her ears?”

  “Wynnell is hip, Abby. I didn’t want to offend you and your mother with the S word, that’s all.”

  “The S word?” Mama said.

  “She means stiffed,” I said.

  Wynnell and C.J. sound absolutely wicked when they laugh in unison, especially when the laughter is directed at me. “You sound like a couple of fourth-graders,” I said.

  “And I, for one, am not at all offended,” Mama said. “I think stiff is a lovely word. You know, I’ve been searching for years, and just last month now I finally found a man who does it right.”

  I clamped my hands over my ears. If only I could close them; if only we humans came equipped with “earlids.”

  “Mama,” I moaned. “Why must you mortify me like this?”

  “Oh Abby, you’re such a prude. A well-starched crinoline is something of which to be proud. I used to do it myself, but frankly it’s a messy job that I’d just rather not be doing at my age. So when I discovered that new full-service laundry up there on East Bay—”

  Of course covered ears are only symbolic; they don’t stop one from being able to hear. “Is that all, Mama? Stiff crinolines?”

  “Why Abby, dear, whatever else could I possibly mean?”

  I presented her with a blank face, one honed by my years as her teenage daughter. “Beats me, Mama.”

  “Oh, by the way, dear, I decided not to report my car stolen if you’ll do my crinolines for the next three months. I figure that with the money I’ll save I can have a nice little visit with your cousin down in Savannah. Do we have a deal, or should I beat Chanti to the punch?”

  “Mama, you wouldn’t! Would you?”

  “Beats me, Abby.”

  “She’s got you, Abby,” Wynnell said. “She does your blank face even better than you do.”

  C.J. sighed. “I wish that I had me a mama—especially a young-looking one like you, Mozella. Granny Ledbetter has so many wrinkles that you never know which one’s going to open when she talks—bless her heart.”

  “Bless her heart,” we echoed in unison.

  I clapped my hands. “Okay ladies, time’s a-wasting, so here’s the deal. Jerry Ovumkoph was murdered so that someone could take possession of a ring she was wearing.”

  “Diamond?” Mama asked.

  “An emerald—practically the size of an egg. She wanted to give it to me, but I refused to take it.”

  Mama clucked like the hen that might have laid such an egg. “Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth—not to speak ill of the dead.” She opened one of the two pill cases and flung its contents over her shoulder.

  “Hey! What was that?” The beefy man in the wife-beater T-shirt was out of his banquette and looming over our table.

  “It was salt,” Mama said calmly.

  “It was to ward off bad luck,” Wynnell said.

  “Back in Shelby we once had a horse with no mouth,” C.J. said, apropos of nothing. “We had to feed it through—”

  “What’d you say?” Big and Beefy demanded.

  “Don’t mind her,” I said. “She claims to be part Nubian—goat, that is—and may even have the horns to prove it.”

  “Cousin Calamity Jane Ledbetter Cox, is that you?”

  “Cousin Rufus Horatio Ledbetter III Junior, is that you?”

  “Lord have mercy,” Mama said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  By then the big galoot and the big bully were wrapped around each other like clumps of kelp washed up on the beach after a storm. What were the odds that we’d run into another one of the Ledbetters, one of Granny’s direct descendants, in a great big city like Charlotte, North Carolina? And in a sophisticated place like an overpriced gourmet coffee shop of all places?

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “How can someone be designated the III and still be a Junior?”

  “Sh-Sh-Shelby,” Wynnell hissed.

  The cousins disengaged. “Hey, don’t be in
sulting our hometown. It’s as fine a place as any to grow up. And you,” he said to Mama in particular, “don’t be tossing sodium chloride into folks’ faces—sorry about the alliteration.” Then he grabbed his coffee container and was off.

  Chapter 8

  C.J. was still beaming half an hour later when we got to the Tabernacle of Joy Through Giving. It wasn’t just that we had run into someone from her past—a cousin no less—but his brutish nature aside, this man was rather normal. Sure, it was a reference to owning a horse with no mouth that made it possible for him to recognize her, but if we’re really honest about it, we’ve all had experiences every bit as bizarre. Haven’t we?

  Thus it was that when we entered the sanctuary she was at her most socially acceptable level of behavior, if I might use that term. I’d even go so far as to say that we were virtually indistinguishable from any other of the worshippers. We both were decked out in polyester flowered dresses with high necklines and distressingly low hemlines (for a shrimpette like me, at any rate). We both tied the frocks in back, but loosely, so as not to accentuate our provocative feminine attributes. Our sleeves were supposed to come down to our elbows, but in my case, they reached almost to my wrists. We even pinned our hair atop our heads, and fastened tightly rolled falls above our crowns to simulate “holy roller” buns.

  I was wearing one extra element of disguise, one that I am ashamed to admit to possessing. Just about a month prior, my optometrist, a pleasant presbyopic Presbyterian, had given me a prescription for bifocals. It was hard to adjust to the darn things, and I usually kept them in my purse, but now was as good a time as any to give them the old college try.

  But sad to say, I hadn’t been to church in a long while—certainly not one as conservative as Pastor Sam’s—so I’d plumb forgotten that we would have done well to bring our own Bibles as part of our illusion. This omission of detail earned us both looks of mild suspicion, and in C.J.’s case, an all too firm handshake. When the big gal winces, the game is on.

  “Good morning, sisters,” the deacon who greeted us said. “Where are y’all from?”