Bad Housekeeping

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Bad Housekeeping Page 25

by Maia Chance

“Surely Susie’s Speedy Maids never cleaned at Jentry’s—”

  “Kathleen Todd mentioned the ganja to me once. Bad move. She knew all about it because Jentry is her daughter Jodi’s boyfriend. Kathleen never called the cops on him because of her daughter and grandson.”

  “Okay.” My brain was spinning like an off-balance Maytag. “And you use the information in the Rolodex to blackmail people?”

  “Wrong again,” Susie said. “Kathleen Todd was using the Rolodex to blackmail people.”

  Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.

  “Wait,” I said. “You were using Susie’s Speedy Maids as an excuse to go into people’s houses for months, weren’t you? Or was it years? Poking around and finding out everyone’s dirty secrets. Then what? You gave the secrets to Kathleen Todd?”

  “Gee, you’re almost as smart as lover-boy here, Agnes Blythe. Except I didn’t give Kathleen Todd the secrets. I sold them to her. I’m a businesswoman.”

  “If you aren’t a blackmailer, why do you want the Rolodex?”

  “None of your business!”

  Susie had completely violated her clients’ trust, and furthermore, it probably wouldn’t be hard for anyone to deduce that the private information in the Rolodex had been gathered by Susie’s maids. Her business and her reputation were at stake, and there would surely be serious criminal charges brought too.

  “Enough chit-chat,” she said. “Hand it over.”

  “Please, Agnes, just do what she says!” Roger said.

  I gave him a look.

  “I’m sorry, Agnes,” he said. “I miss you! Shelby’s so—”

  “I don’t care,” I said, putting up a hand.

  “So you’re just going to let this psycho lady shoot me? She’s got a gun that looks like something from Die Hard!”

  “Hand over the Rolodex,” Susie said to me. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’ve got the attention span of a gerbil.” She glanced out into the crowd, and her lips went pale. “Cheese and crackers. Get moving, lover-boy.” She jammed her gun into Roger’s back. He whimpered.

  “What about our trade?” I said.

  Susie didn’t answer. She pushed Roger to the front of the Tunnel of Love line.

  What was going on? Had Susie seen cops in the crowd? I didn’t see any.

  The Tunnel of Love jerked into motion, the train creaking and rattling into the darkness. The carny was just closing the gate, but Susie, herding Roger in front of her, shoved through.

  “Hey,” the carny said in a mild, stoner-ish voice, “it’s two tickets per person.”

  Susie kneed him in the Jackson Pollocks; he doubled over. Susie and Roger clambered up the steps and jumped onto the love train’s last car. They disappeared into the blackness.

  Chapter 28

  I tasted bile and Franken-fries. Not a stellar combo. But Roger’s date with boomery was about to commence, so I slipped past the carny, stampeded up the steps, and plunged into the Tunnel of Love.

  The dark tunnel reeked of stale beer and gear oil. The train up ahead clacked insistently on its track. I lumbered forward.

  The point of the Tunnel of Love was to give teenagers a dark place to make out, so there wasn’t much to see except, encased in the walls behind Plexiglas, crummy lit-up dioramas of supposedly romantic places. I stumbled past the Eiffel Tower and a castle made of spray-painted Styrofoam. Around the first bend, I spotted the caboose of the ride and caught a flash of Susie’s white jacket. I picked up my pace, nearly crashing when I stumbled on a beer can.

  Pretty soon I was just yards behind the caboose. Susie and Roger didn’t seem to notice me; I guess the ride’s clacking was too loud.

  I didn’t have a plan. That was sinking in. I scrambled along, trying to keep pace with the love train. A plan. A plan . . .

  Then I realized: I could hit Susie. With Otis’s grandma’s Rolodex.

  I dug it out, still trotting along, and huffed and puffed closer and closer to the caboose. I held the Rolodex aloft, its index cards fluttering. I was about to bring it down on Susie’s head when she suddenly swung around.

  “You following us?” she said. “Sorry, then, about lover-boy. He was okay-looking before he started sweating.”

  “Help,” Roger said in a choked voice.

  I swung the Rolodex, trying to whack Susie, but I only whapped the air above her head and then Roger’s shoulder.

  Susie muttered something that I guessed were Korean curses, and then bang! Something on the ceiling shattered.

  Roger screamed. So did the rest of the people on the ride.

  I dropped the Rolodex and with all the strength I had left in my body, I grabbed the back of the moving caboose and heaved myself forward. I’d envisioned myself doing a track-star hurdle, but in reality I dumped myself headfirst onto the seat between Susie and Roger.

  More screams. Roger sobbing, Susie cursing, and a long metallic moan as the train was brought to a stop. Everyone else on the ride stampeded forward through the tunnel. I managed to get myself sideways so my feet were on Roger and my head was smashed between the seat and Susie’s leg.

  “Get off me, you maniac!” Susie screamed. She slapped my head.

  “Ow!” I yelled. More squirming—I think I kicked Roger in the throat—and then I’d somehow gotten my mitts on Susie’s gun. It was absurdly large, and the handle was warm. I wrenched it away from her.

  She cursed, but whaddaya know, I was stronger! That was one person in the adults-under-ninety world I was stronger than. Gold star!

  I mostly righted myself and pointed the gun at Susie.

  Her face, lit up by the pink-and-blue light of the diorama behind me, registered fear. Her hands fluttered up in surrender. I guess that meant the gun was loaded.

  “You okay, Roger?” I said over my shoulder.

  “I will be when you get your behind off my shoulder.”

  “Okay, Susie,” I said, “start talking about the murders—Roger, pay attention. You’ll be the witness to her confession.”

  “Wait,” Roger said. “Agnes, I want to say something.”

  “Can it wait?” I said, not taking my eyes off Susie.

  “No.” Roger’s tone was half-pompous, half-wounded.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Agnes, I’ve made a mistake. About breaking things off with you.”

  “What?”

  “I was also wrong about what I said, about you being not adventurous.”

  Susie snickered.

  “You’re the most exciting woman I’ve ever met,” Roger went on, “and I—I miss you.”

  I glanced at Roger behind me. He looked flabby and crumpled. Okay, technically I was crumpling him with the weight of my body, but you know what I mean. “What about Shelby?” I asked.

  “Forget her! She’s so immature! I don’t even care about abs—she’s been on my case about toning my abs even though I told her I’m writing a paper for an extremely prestigious conference. Jesus. Take me back, Agnes. Please.”

  This was it. The magical moment that every dumpee dreams of. Yet it only felt stale and laughable.

  “You can work things out with Shelby,” I said. “Let her help you tone your abs, and then you can help her read books or something—hey!” Susie was taking the opportunity to climb stealthily out of the caboose. “Hold it, or I’ll shoot.”

  Susie thumped back to a seat, hands once more up in surrender.

  “All I want to know, Susie, is why you murdered Kathleen Todd, Bud Budzinski, and Megan Lawrence. Was it just to get the Rolodex back?”

  “I didn’t murder anyone.”

  The gun in my hand shook a little. “Then who did?”

  Something flickered across Susie’s face. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying. You’re . . . afraid of someone.”

  Susie licked her lips. “Okay, fine. It was—”

  “No,” someone said from the darkness.

  Susie, Roger, and I swiveled to look over the back of the caboose.

&nb
sp; A stumpy form slowly unpeeled from the shadows. Blue diorama light bounced off a gun and a pair of Keds sneakers.

  “Dorrie Tucker?” I breathed.

  Dorrie came closer. Closer.

  “I’ve got a gun, Dorrie,” I called. Darn that tremor in my voice.

  “I don’t believe for a second that you know how to shoot that thing, Agnes Blythe,” Dorrie said. “I’ve never seen you at the shooting range.” She stopped a yard away. Pink light bathed her soft cheeks and puffy hair. Her lips pursed with distaste. A shiny purse dangled from her shoulder. “You three are to do as I say, or there will be bloodshed. Am I clear?”

  “Um, yes,” I said.

  Roger whimpered softly. Susie nodded.

  “Susie Pak, and whoever this smelly little man is, walk—slowly—away through the rear of the tunnel,” Dorrie said. “Do not look back.”

  Roger and Susie clambered out of the caboose and scurried away.

  “Gee, thanks for the help, Roger,” I shouted after him.

  “Now, Agnes,” Dorrie said, “hand over the gun.”

  I looked down at the gun in my hand.

  “Now!”

  I handed it over. What was I going to do? Dorrie obviously knew her way around a Glock or whatever that was she was pointing at my heart.

  “Thank you.” Dorrie slid Susie’s gun into her purse. “Now you are going to take a nice walk with me. If you try to run or cry for help, Little Snuggums here”—she waggled her gun—“is coming out to play. Okeydokey?”

  “Okay,” I croaked.

  Dorrie pushed open a side door I hadn’t noticed, and twilight seeped in. I went first, Dorrie right behind me. A noisy crowd congregated over by the Tunnel of Love’s entrance, with security personnel mixed in. No one noticed Dorrie and me as we tromped down side steps and through a gate in the temporary fencing.

  “Where are we going?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “Don’t speak unless you are spoken to.”

  Dorrie concealed her gun under her cardigan, keeping it pressed against my middle. We wove through the crowd, and then we were cutting in line for the Ferris wheel, and somehow Dorrie shoved me onto a seat and sat down beside me. We swooped back and up into the air. The metal safety bar hadn’t been lowered, and I couldn’t reach it.

  Adrenaline jetted through me. What was worse? Being shot point-blank or falling off a Ferris wheel? Take your pick.

  I hitched an arm over the back of the rocking seat. The glittering fair sprawled out below. Dorrie was busy doing something with her gun—checking the bullets?—and a feeble little idea fluttered into my brain. I sneaked my free hand around to the outer pocket of my backpack—this was the side away from Dorrie—unzipped it slowly, very slowly—

  The Ferris wheel stopped. We were almost at the top, and it had stopped.

  Creak-creaaakk, creak-creaaak went the hinges of our seat.

  “Could we put the safety bar down, maybe?” I said. My stomach boiled with nausea.

  “No,” Dorrie said primly. “I am going to push you off just as soon as the Ferris wheel starts up again and we’re at the top.”

  Less chance of a witness if she pushed me off the top, I guessed. Sight lines and all that.

  “Wow,” I said, “what’s that down there by the Tiltin’ Teacups? A giant pink bunny?”

  “Where?” Dorrie craned her neck.

  I took the opportunity to view my phone at an awkward angle under my elbow and sneakily turn it on.

  Three percent battery. That meant it could power off at any moment. I tapped open my voice memo app, cleared my throat, and spoke loudly in the hopes of getting Dorrie to follow suit so we’d be caught clearly on the recorder. “So, Dorrie, how was it killing Kathleen Todd?”

  Dorrie sniffed. “Not as satisfying as I’d imagined all those thousands of times.”

  “You’re confessing?”

  “Why not? You’ll be dead in a few minutes. And my mama always told me it helps to get things out in the open. Better than chamomile tea for sleeping, she said.”

  “Okay, so why did you kill Kathleen?”

  “I’d had it up to here with her bullying! And then I found that horrible Rolodex. She’d left it at my house by mistake. Of course, I’d had suspicions that she was doing that sort of thing. I mean, she knew everyone’s secrets. Everyone’s. But I was in there. Her most loyal friend!”

  “Oh yeah? Was it about how you murdered your husband? I didn’t have him for social studies, but a friend of mine did. I heard he was a bully.”

  “How did you learn about Bruce?” Dorrie hunched toward me, her voice going horror-movie raspy. Our seat swung violently.

  “Lucky guess.” I clung to the cold metal seat. Water filled my eyes. “Okay, so you saw Kathleen’s Rolodex, and she had stuff in there about how you had—what, poisoned?—your husband. Then what? You confronted her?”

  “She was so surprised. Thought I’d never stand up for myself. For a long time, I didn’t stand up for myself with her. But she’d started calling me Dorrie the Doormat, just like Bruce used to. Then she’d laugh and say ‘you don’t mind, do you?’ and I’d simply smile and nod, smile and nod.”

  “Your choices were for you to do whatever Kathleen wanted, or she’d turn you in to the police for killing your husband.”

  “That was the position she wanted everyone in town in. She’d didn’t blackmail people for money, oh no. She wanted obedience. She wanted a whole town full of her slaves.”

  “What did she make you do?”

  “Ran me ragged as her assistant. Gave me tongue-lashings whenever she needed to vent. Nothing Bruce hadn’t gotten me used to. But she was overlooking the fact that I had killed Bruce and I could kill again.”

  “Did you plan it?”

  “Not really. I had daydreamed about it often before I ever saw the Rolodex because, well, she was such a domineering . . . you know.” Dorrie touched her hair. “When I saw the Rolodex—she’d accidentally left it in my house the day she died, in a box of historical society files—I went to her house that evening to tell her how angry I was with her about it. She wasn’t home. I went to where I knew she would be.”

  “The Stagecoach Inn?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know she’d be there?”

  “Because she was obsessed with that filthy old place! She’d always wanted it for herself—she wanted to restore it into something out of a glossy magazine, just like your crazy auntie wanted to—but old Herman Colby refused to sell it to her. That didn’t stop Kathleen from coveting the inn. I’d followed her there once before and seen her wandering the rooms, touching the woodwork with a dreamy look on her face. Kathleen Todd was crazy. She wanted everything around her to be perfect, and when it wasn’t, it made her cruel.”

  All those haunting stories about the inn, about lights going on and off in the middle of the night . . . that hadn’t been a ghost. It had been Kathleen Todd.

  “That night, she was visiting the inn one last time, I suppose,” Dorrie said. “Saying good-bye since she had gotten Karl Knudsen to set the demolition date.”

  “If she loved the inn so much, why would she want it demolished?”

  “Don’t you watch Dr. Phil? If she couldn’t have the inn, no one could. I only meant to confront Kathleen about the Rolodex. But she somehow got her scarf caught in that wringer contraption. It felt so good, having her trapped for a change, hearing her beg me for help. But, stupid woman, she couldn’t leave well enough alone and called me Dorrie the Doormat one too many times. So I cranked that wringer until it shut her up.”

  I swallowed. “Then what?”

  “Then I left.”

  “You must’ve been wearing gloves,” I said. “If you’d left fingerprints, the police would have arrested you right away.”

  “Yes. My gardening gloves.”

  “So maybe you were thinking of murdering Kathleen when you headed to her house that night.”

  “Maybe.”

  Dorrie was the
type who wasn’t going to take full responsibility for anything. “You started the rumor about my great-aunt and me at the Black Drop the next morning.”

  “I thought that was quite tidy. I was there when you threatened to strangle Kathleen, and I was also shopping at the Green Apple when your auntie and Kathleen had words.”

  “It wasn’t tidy at all,” I said. “You slipped up, Dorrie. You mentioned my great-aunt’s sound machine in your rumor, but only the murderer could have heard the sound machine.”

  Dorrie pursed her lips. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “Do you still have the Rolodex?”

  “Yes. I plan to use it, just like Kathleen did. I’m just waiting for things to die down.”

  “What about Megan?” I asked. “What about Bud?”

  “Bud told me he knew about the Rolodex and Bruce’s death when I visited him the day before yesterday about that appalling neon sign. He had to go, and good riddance. We don’t want that sort in Naneda.”

  “And you overheard Megan talking to me on the phone about the Rolodex at her mom’s wake, right?”

  “Oh, yes. Megan was sleeping with Bud, you know. No morals. That’s probably why Kathleen wrote Megan out of her will.”

  Yeah. That was probably why Kathleen had been powerless to get Budzinski to remove his neon sign, too; he had the leverage of knowing about Kathleen’s blackmail scheme.

  “It’s so easy to poison people when you know what their favorite foods are,” Dorrie said. “Bud was stuffing his face with Oreos when I visited him about the neon sign. And skinny-minnie Megan, well, she would break her strict diet for a macaroni-cheese casserole. I’d seen her do it at her mother’s house. She just couldn’t help herself.”

  “How did you know that Jodi was growing monkshood?”

  “She told me all about it once, at a gardening show. She sells it to some hippie medicine company.”

  “You told me about Jodi’s monkshood earlier to put me off the scent. Did you also send Jentry after me today?”

  “Oh, yes. I knew he’d be furious about you snooping at his farm again, so I called him—his telephone number is in the Rolodex, actually—and told him you were headed there. I hoped he’d get rid of you. But you’re like a garden mole, Agnes. You keep popping up. So annoying. People poison moles, you know, although it’s much more effective to drown them or stomp their little skulls in. After I get rid of you, Susie Pak is next on the list.”

 

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