The Mutual Admiration Society

by Lesley Kagen

  But what Charlie and me are curious about is why, instead of running straight for Mr. McGinty’s front door, Birdie has scurried over to the side of his shack, to the lit window. And how come she’s crouching below it, giving us the shhh sign, and raising and lowering her hand the way I do when I want her to get down on all fours?

  We don’t have time for this! We’re on a tight schedule and it’s already taken us fifteen minutes to get this far, but what choice do we have? Charlie, who knows good as me what can happen when we don’t buckle under to my sister’s demands, shrugs and says, “Ladies first.”

  When we reach Birdie, I lean my back against the shack and whisper to her, “What the hell?” Mr. McGinty would not like it at all if he caught us spying on him. He hates Gotchas! and he’s so dang jumpy he might bayonet us by accident, and I think he knows jiu jitsu, too.

  What my sister is doing only gets clear when she slowly stands up to peek into the shack window, which is one of the only ones in the neighborhood, except for Lutheran taxidermist Mr. Johnson’s basement one, that she can see into without me or Charlie piggybacking her or the soda crate raising her up a notch.

  Oh, for godssakes.

  I know what she’s up to. My little dodo Bird has gotten her wires crossed and is mixing up the plans. “First, we go see Mister McGinty and give him back his medal and ask for his help getting the money you took back into the Pagan Baby collection box. Second, we go snooping and eavesdropping around the neighborhood for information about where Sister Margaret Mary took off to,” is what I told her four times when we were eating the chocolate ice cream on our back porch.

  I get a hold of the back of her shorts and take in a deep breath to pull her down and repeat the plan to her again, but my sister knocks my hand away and points frantically at Charlie and me and then points frantically to Mr. McGinty’s open window, so what choice do we have? Time is ticking and we still have so much left to do tonight, it’s best for all concerned if the future Mr. and Mrs. Charlie “Cue Ball” Garfield just get this over with and . . . and lo and behold!

  I’m so surprised when I peek into the shack window to see the two of them sitting at the card table talking softly and smiling at one another that my tummy does a handstand, because it can’t figure out which end is up, either!

  But I 100% know now that I’m not, I repeat, not going to have to spend the next three days biting my nails while I try to honor Kitten’s dare, but I also 100% know now that our dear and gentle caretaking friend is, I repeat is, going to be sent up the river.

  Mr. Lynwood “My friends call me Woody and my enemies call me their worst nightmare” Bellflower would drum me out of the modern detecting business for what I’m about to do, but I can’t stop myself.

  When the guy who’s always on alert for intruders swivels his head and sees The Mutual Admiration Society peeking in on him and his guest, I shout, “Holy shit on a shingle, Mister McGinty! You really did kidnap Sister Margaret Mary?!”

  22

  A STATISTICAL MIRACLE

  “Come on in, kids,” the caretaker of the cemetery says when he throws open the door of his shack. “We’ve been expecting you. After you help yourself to refreshments, please join us at the table.”

  Of course, my sister practically knocks him down on the way to the snacks sitting on the kitchen counter, and after she’s snagged them, she plops down in one of the three folding chairs closest to the gal who has been the topic of my every thought and most of my conversations since Gert Klement told Birdie and me and Louise on our back porch this morning that a “terrible incident took place last night.”

  “What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” an overfriendly and too-affectionate Birdie says to Sister Margaret Mary after she stuffed the bottom half of a windmill cookie in her mouth. (Please, God, please, I’m begging You, don’t let my sister suddenly go old-timey or juicy smooch our principal’s cheek or . . . or do anything else really weird, because as You know, this prickly employee of Yours has the power to keep her in the third grade forever.) “We been lookin’ for you all day, isn’t that right, Tessie?”

  I’m still standing next to Charlie in the doorway of the shack, because I’m so shocked to see our principal that I’m opening and closing my mouth like Charlie McCarthy before Mr. Edgar Bergen supplies him with words. I know what should be coming out of my mouth is That’s right, Birdie, we have been looking for Sister Margaret Mary all day, good remembering, but that’s what a really great Gotcha! can do to a kid. Turn them into a dummy.

  Charlie has developed a case of lockjaw, too, but Birdie is having no problem gabbing away with the gal who I barely recognize. She still looks like she swallowed a yardstick, but she isn’t dressed in her nun’s clothes. She’s wearing one of Mr. McGinty’s white Sunday shirts and a pair of the gray pants he puts on when he’s working in the cemetery, and her feet are in floppy mukluks and not in those squishy black shoes she wears when she sneaks around the halls at school trying to catch kids skipping out. And the answer to the playground question “Do nuns have hair and boobies?” is yes. Sister M & M’s hair is styled in a pixie cut and it’s a color that’s close to the same as Mr. McGinty’s chestnut brown, and if she had a job at Lonnigan’s serving schnapps to customers, believe me, this nun would make a ton of tips.

  Because Sister doesn’t have any ropes or chains keeping her in the folding chair she’s sitting so straight-backed in, it doesn’t look like she’s a prisoner being held for ransom, so what in the heck is this nun doing here running her hand down Pyewacket’s back and looking at Mr. McGinty with so much love beaming out of her windows to the soul?

  Uh-oh.

  Was I right when I wondered if the reason her initials of M. M. are etched on the back of the expensive St. Christopher medal along with J. M. is because they really are doing the “horizontal polka”? Are the two of them sitting here planning a secret honeymoon trip to Wisconsin Dells? Was that what Sister Margaret Mary was doing when Birdie and one of Kitten’s snitches spotted her near the weeping willow tree earlier? Practicing her running away?

  Sweating bullets but sick of beating the bushes for her all day, I screw up my courage and ask from the shack doorway, “Why were you running around the willow tree today, Sister?”

  “Tessie, please join us. I’ll bring you and Charlie your cookies and soda,” Mr. McGinty says with little nudges that get us going in that direction, “and we’ll answer all your questions.”

  I don’t want to stare at Sister Margaret Mary when I pull out the folding chair on the other side of Birdie, but I can’t help myself, and neither can Charlie when he sits on the other side of me.

  After Mr. McGinty brings down the venetian blinds on the windows, which is a little suspicious, if you ask me, he sets the plates of cookies and glasses of root beer down in front of my fiancé and me, places his hands on our principal’s shoulders, and says, “Children, I’d like you to meet my sister, Martha.”

  “Your . . . your . . . WHAT?!” I holler.

  Charlie spews out, “Sister Margaret Mary is your sister?!” because this life-changing information has caught him off guard, too.

  After our principal uses her napkin to dab at the mess Charlie made on the table when the soda came shooting out of his nose, she nods and tells him, “That’s correct, Jasper. Jimmy and I are twins.”

  This is not a case of mistaken identity on her part.

  Jasper is Charlie’s baptized name. I don’t call him that because before his mother suicided herself, he was so outgoing that his neighborhood nickname was Jasper “The Friendly Ghost” Garfield, and I don’t think he wants to be reminded of those good old days any more than I want anyone reminding me of when everything was good with my world.

  The gal born Martha McGinty smiles down at my cat purring in her lap, the little Siamese traitor, then turns toward me and says, “And in answer to your question, Theresa, I was running around the weeping willow earlier today because I was attempting to catch Pye in order to remove a large burr
she had embedded in her fur.”

  I saw Pye streak out from under the willow when I was looking for Charlie on top of the cemetery hill earlier, and I also noticed that horrible burr she had matted in her fur when she and Charlie were sitting on his back porch looking for feathered friends together after Birdie and me made our leap of faith into his backyard, so she’s not making that up.

  “Twins are a statistical miracle!” my fiancé says, like a pig rolling in you-know-what.

  Sister Margaret Mary looks at her brother across the table and says with a dazzling smile that I have never seen before, “Indeed they are.”

  I don’t know, ya know?

  They don’t look like twins, except for how tall and strong they both are, and the fact that they got the same hair color, cow-brown eyes, and those great choppers. But I’m not stupid. I know there are those other kinds of twins that aren’t identical. I can’t remember what they’re called now, but those kinds of twins are always very alike in their personalities. Johnny and Janie Mahlberg, who are in the seventh grade, both of them have collecting bugs as a hobby. Sixth-graders David and Donna Peabody, the two of them love to play tetherball and can finish each other’s sentences. And look at the Bobsey twins! Nan and Bert, and Freddie and Flossie, they like to have adventures and sometimes solve mysteries. But other than having very religious personalities, what could the so-called McGinty “twins” have in common?

  Q. Is it even humanly possible that our principal, who I can’t imagine even being born, more like ascending from Hell with strict instructions from Satan to be her meanest to kids, is related to our good and dear friend, sweet and shy Mr. McGinty?

  A. It is certain.

  Q. Oh, yeah? Then how come nobody told me this before?

  A. Cannot predict now.

  “How come you never told me you had a twin sister before?” I blurt out to Mr. McGinty.

  He must not be offended by my suspicious-sounding tone, because he smiles, and says so convincingly, “But I have, Tessie. I’m certain I mentioned it on the afternoon that you and Birdie helped me plant the lilac bushes near Mister Gilgood’s mausoleum. When you told me they were your favorites, I distinctly remember telling you that my twin sister, Martha, loves them, too.”

  Birdie and me talk about so many things with him when he’s working in the cemetery, and he’s very soft-spoken, and I can get easily distracted by her, so maybe he did tell me he had a twin the day he was planting lilacs near the mausoleum and I just didn’t catch it because the smell of lilacs almost puts me in a stupor, or maybe I really do need hearing aids, or maybe, for some unknown reason, him and his so-called sister are making this whole story up, and a few days from now I’ll get a picture postcard from Wisconsin Dells with Babe the Blue Ox on the front.

  “Now that we’ve answered your questions, why don’t one of you start out by explaining to Martha and me,” the caretaker says, “why you thought I’d kidnapped her?”

  “Tessie heard someone yellin’ last night, ‘I’m warning you! Watch your step! You’re treading on dangerous ground!’” Birdie jumps in and says. “And she also heard a bloody-murder scream and then she saw outta our bedroom window a tall, skinny guy who wasn’t Mister Howard Howard ’cause he’s short and he eats too many jelly donuts with his Jim sneak behind the Gilgood mausoleum with a limp body!”

  I automatically correct her, but in a very impressed way, because I’m proud that she remembers almost to the word what she told our mother on our back porch this morning. “Mister Howard Howard eats too many jelly donuts with his joe.”

  “Roger that.”

  “And when Missus Klement told Tessie this morning that you”—Charlie points at our principal—“had disappeared, she assumed that you were the kidnapped murdered victim that she saw.”

  “Kidnapped and murdered?” Mr. McGinty says.

  “Disappeared?” our principal says, also with a surprised, puzzled look. “But I left a note for Sister Prudence explaining that I was called away on an emergency and that I’d return the following day, which she would have certainly shared with the other sisters.”

  “But Sister Prudence didn’t find your note right away,” Charlie says. “So for a while today, everybody in the neighborhood, not just us, thought you had vanished.”

  The McGintys look at each other across the table like they had no idea that the parish had been in such an uproar.

  “I can understand how you might misinterpret what you saw out of your bedroom window last night, Tessie,” Mr. McGinty says, “but how could you believe that I’d commit a kidnapping and a murder?”

  “’Cause . . . ’cause . . .”

  Oh, boy.

  That is what my English Gammy would call, if she was a detective, THE CASE OF THE STICKY WICKET. I didn’t want to hurt my friend’s feelings and I can tell that I have by how craggy his salt-map face is looking. “I went to the library a few weeks ago and Miss Peshong dropped this book in my wagon all about detecting and I learned that when it comes to solvin’ crimes that I needed . . .” It’s going to take too long to explain how I step-by-step reached this awful conclusion about him, but I can tell him how Modern Detection expects a gumshoe to have means, motive, and opportunity. “I couldn’t figure out what your motive would be to do something like that, because you are a very nice, religious gentleman, but you are also tall and thin like the guy I thought I saw carrying what I thought was a murdered body last night, which you had the opportunity to do because you live here.” I fan my arm around the shack. “And the means to commit that crime are your very strong grave-digging arms that could easily strangle a gal or stab them with your switchblade knife. And the icing was stuck on top of the cake when Birdie and me came over here this morning to look for evidence behind the Gilgood mausoleum and we found this.”

  Uh-oh.

  It isn’t in my pocket.

  “Actually, I found this in the leaf pile behind Mr. Gilgood’s mausoleum.” Birdie opens up her hand to reveal his beloved medal with a minx of a grin. What a show-off! She must’ve pickpocketed it offa me when we were sitting so close together on our back porch eating the Sealtest ice cream.

  Of course, Mr. McGinty says, “Oh! Wonderful!” and looks overjoyed beyond belief to get back his holy lucky medal, but I am about to find out that’s not only because it kept him mostly safe during the war. Before he fastens it back where it belongs, he aims a sweet look across the table and says, “Martha gave it to me the day I shipped out.”

  “So that’s why it’s got your initials and hers on the back!” Charlie jumps out of his seat and shouts like he just found gold in them thar hills.

  “Not ’cause the two of you are gonna get married and go on a honeymoon in Wisconsin Dells,” I add on.

  FACT: Mr. McGinty and Sister Margaret Mary really are twins.

  PROOF: Their eyes pop wide and their jaws drop open at exactly the same time.

  “Do you want to set the record straight or shall I, Jimmy?” our principal asks.

  “Let me,” he answers, which is only right. He is our good and dear friend and this nun is not either one. “Tessie, what you heard last night was me shouting a warning to Martha to watch her step because the lights in that part of the cemetery, as you know, have never worked properly, and she was dangerously close to falling into Mister Peterman’s open grave. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough with my warning, and the screech you heard was the one she made when she lost her footing, tumbled into the hole, and knocked herself out.”

  Hmmm . . .

  I am very, very good at recognizing people’s voices, especially if I’ve heard them talk hundreds of times and they sound a lot like Mr. Ed “Velveeta” Herlihy, but I guess it is possible that I might not have recognized Mr. McGinty’s voice last night at 12:07 a.m. I was so wrapped up in practicing my Miss America routine, and I have never heard our soft-spoken friend yell, not once, even when I have forgotten to give him my woo . . . woo . . . whoot whistle when I come across him in the cemetery and acci
dentally scare him half to death. From years of experience, I know that people can sound very different when they raise their voices. Butch Seeback goes from sounding like a sock puppet to a stuck pig, and Birdie can go from sounding like a cooing pigeon to a squawking chicken when she gets all worked up, and Charlie’s father, who barely talks at all? I can hear him bear-growling at his boys all the way to our house when he has had entirely too much joy juice.

  “So you pulled your sister out of the grave and then you carried her limp body over to the Gilgood m . . . m . . . mausoleum so you could revive her,” Charlie says, like he is an expert on getting knocked out, which he might be from all the times he watched his father deck his dearly departed mother.

  FACT: I am the worst gumshoe on the planet.

  PROOF: The facts that Mr. McGinty just laid out at his card table.

  In my defense, at least I got the description of the man right, and I was also correct when I thought that the screech I heard sounded familiar, but what about . . .

  “Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute,” I say, feeling a little more clearheaded now that I got those cookies and root beer in my tummy, and some of the answers to the mystery I’ve been trying to solve all day in my head. There’s something fishy about Mr. McGinty’s explanation. The timing is off. His sister is a nun, for crissakes. They lead very dull, holy lives. Every kid in the neighborhood knows that the lights go off at the convent at 10:00 p.m. sharp.

  “What were you,” I ask our principal, “doing over here at 12:07 a.m. when you’re supposed to be fast asleep?”

  “Martha needed to speak to me about an important matter that couldn’t wait,” Mr. McGinty answers for her. “She came to discuss—”

  “The stolen Pagan Baby money,” Sister Margaret Mary says as she wraps her hand around Birdie’s hand, like she’s her prisoner and she doesn’t want her to escape. “I was in the church the evening Robin took the donations out of the collection box, Theresa.”