Why can’t our mother see that Birdie and me need the cemetery? It’s not only our lifeline to Daddy, death is our #1 hobby, and her thinking that fads like Hula-Hooping or stamp collecting would be “healthier pastimes” and “less morbid” is so shortsighted. Death is never going to go out of style, and it’s not a pain in the butt to chase down the block if it gets away from you, and it also doesn’t make your mouth taste like glue.
And this is not even taking into consideration how in this beautiful cemetery that has so many trees and smells of flowers and just-mowed grass in the summer and at this time of the year burning leaves and sweet, ripe red apples, I have learned so much more than I ever have slouched over a desk in a stuffy classroom that reeks of chalk, kid sweat, and Fartin’ Marty Larson.
Death is also very educational.
The tombstone that Birdie and me are strolling past now taught us that one job we should never get if we grow up is taxicab driving. Mr. McGinty told us that this poor man got killed by a passenger who took all his money and plugged him in the head with a .45.
DARGU MALISHEWSKI
JULY 10, 1911–APRIL 22, 1957
FARE THEE WELL
Something else I’ve also learned during the many hours we’ve spent in Holy Cross is that the Finley sisters really have to watch our steps. Not just grown-ups kick the bucket, kids do, too. Here and there and all over the place.
Cute little Jody Gersh choked on an apple. (A crying shame.) Three-year-old Bucky Martin drank lighter fluid. (Heartbreaking.) And two little girls named Junie and Sara who got murdered and left next to the Washington Park Lagoon are buried side by side under a white-trunked birch tree that shades their graves. (Worst way to go.) When I asked Mr. McGinty, who understands so much about life and death, why the girls from the next parish over weren’t put in the ground near the pond, because I thought after the awful way they died they deserved to be set into the swankiest part of the cemetery, he set me straight. “The pond looks very similar to the lagoon, Tessie. When their families come to visit, it might bring back memories of where their children’s bodies were found and that would be too much to bear. Grievers’ hearts can only take so much before they bust into a million little pieces.”
After he told me that, I surprised the hell outta the both of us when I swooned to the grass and burst into bawling because that was exactly the way I felt after Daddy died. Like my heart had done a cannonball onto a slab of granite and if I never saw Lake Michigan or any other lake as long as I lived it would it be too soon for me.
Birdie didn’t feel as bad as me. Not at first, anyway.
No matter how many times I repeated what happened on the afternoon that Daddy died, she wouldn’t believe that he wasn’t ever coming back. That might seem like she was just being her weird self, but it was more than that. Unless you actually see someone die before your eyes, the way I did, I know from years of watching what goes on in the cemetery from our back porch that it can be very hard to understand that someone you loved with your whole heart, someone who inhaled your exhales, someone who you could never imagine living without, has ceased to exist. That’s why God invented funerals and burials. As proof.
So when Louise refused to take Birdie and me to Daddy’s pretend funeral and burial, and when she wouldn’t show us where his gravestone had been sunk in Holy Cross, Birdie, who needs help understanding even the simplest things, had the worst time coming to grips with Daddy’s demise. And after she saw the picture postcard in the rack at Dalinsky’s Drugstore with the sunburned man on the front that I had to admit did look a lot like our handsome father holding up a fish with a pointy nose next to an ocean, my sister got convinced that Daddy was gone, but he was coming back. She 100% decided that after he hit his head on the motor and fell out of The High Life, he got amnesia and paddled to Boca Raton, Florida, and once she gets something stuck into her mulish mind, believe me, there is no budging it. From that day on, I lived in deathly fear that Louise would find out Birdie was thinking something so loonatic that could get her sent to the county asylum quicker than you could say The Three Faces of Eve.
Figuring the only way my sister would ever know for sure that Daddy was in a better position to do some deep-sea fishing than she’d let herself believe, I was positive that seeing his pretend grave with her own eyes would do the trick. Since our mother wouldn’t help us out, I went to our friend, who also happens to be Birdie’s and my godfather, by the way, Mr. McGinty. After I explained to him the awful pickle I was in, I begged him to take me to where Daddy’s casket had been sunk, but he told me that he was sorry, that it wasn’t “his place,” which really hurt my feelings, because if Holy Cross is anybody’s place, it’s his.
I spent every minute I could searching the cemetery for Daddy all by myself, but it’s so big and very hard to find what you’re looking for when your eyes are watering and the tombstones start to bleed together, so the Finley sisters were really down for the count. There Birdie was, feeling like her daddy would be home any second with a sandy tan and a pointy-nosed fish to fry up for supper, and I was feeling so sad and so bad about not saving him and worried to death about Louise finding out about my sister’s undying belief in his Boca Raton amnesia that I was about two ticks away from saying goodbye cruel world and diving into the closest open grave.
But . . . see?
That only goes to show you how smart Daddy was when he’d punch his bag and make our basement floor slippery with sweat and tell me his most famous saying of all, “No matter how bad things get, Tessie, you gotta always remember, come Hell or high water, a Finley never, ever throws in the towel,” because just when I was about to do just that . . . lo and behold . . . we found him!
EDWARD ALFRED FINLEY
REST IN PEACE
SEPTEMBER 2, 1931–AUGUST 1, 1959
Half-Irish kids like Birdie and me are only half-lucky, so us being led to his tombstone by a flock of fireflies during a crackling storm that lit up the night sky with so many lightning forks that it looked like God’s silverware drawer, well, need I say more?
FACT: Miracles happen to Catholic kids.
PROOF: The Blessed Virgin Mary magically appeared to three shepherd children in a place called Fatima, Portugal, and she also stopped in to say hello to a girl named Bernadette in Lourdes, France, so fireflies showing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one night to light up the way to our daddy’s pretend grave is something that really could happen, and did.
9:51 a.m. When I see our all-time favorite tombstone in the distance, I get a good grip on Birdie’s hand when she starts to veer that way, and tell her, “Honey, hold up,” and then I remind her about how important good timing is and our life-changing, great-good-luck murder and our Mutual Admiration meeting. “Sorry, but before we go visit Daddy, we need to swing by the Gilgood mausoleum to look for clues like footprints or something like . . . ummm . . .” I probably shouldn’t tell her that we might find Sister Margaret Mary’s dead body back there. I’m not sure how’d she take that because she’s so fragile and this has never come up before. “And what about Charlie? The poor guy is probably already sitting under the willow tree waiting for us to show up for our meeting.” I swipe her too-long bangs out of her slightly bulging eyes that are looking a tad sad. “But I sister-promise, we’ll pick up those chocolate-covered cherries offa Mister Lindley’s grave and then we’ll visit Daddy for as long as you want on our way home instead, s’awright?”
Señor Wences from The Ed Sullivan Show is another one of Birdie’s favorite impressions of mine. She gets such a kick out of that little hand man that I was pretty sure she would do what she always does whenever I imitate him, because sometimes she can be predictable.
Sure enough, Birdie belly laughs and says, “S’awright, Tessie!”—thank God.
To get us where we need to be as soon as possible, I, the president of The Mutual Admiration Society, decide that it’d be a smart idea to take a shortcut to Mr. Gilgood’s mausoleum, but I don’t want to take a completely diffe
rent route than the one I watched the murderer take last night. I don’t want to screw up and miss any important clues along the way like broken branches or a torn piece of clothing, which are the first things Indians, the best trackers that ever lived, check for in the Saturday shoot-’em-ups when they’re hunting down people with forked tongues.
I hold my hand up and tell Birdie, “Wagons, whoa,” and spin back toward the house to look up at our bedroom window so I can get my bearings, and when I do, my Wigwam socks get almost clean knocked off!
I can perfectly see above the white towel Birdie hung out our window to let Charlie know the location of today’s meeting and straight into our bedroom! Clear enough to count the daisies on our wallpaper and admire the paint-by-number picture I did of the sad hobo clown in honor of Daddy that’s hanging above the Finley sisters’ bed. What an eye-opener! I never thought for a second that when I watch what’s going on in the cemetery, that someone could be doing the same thing to me.
“Look! The mausoleum!” my sister shouts. “Go, Bird, go!”
“Nooo,” I yell when she whips her hand out of mine and rabbits off. “Come back here! I . . . I gotta tell you something really, really, really, really important!”
I just got a very bad thought.
Now that I know that looking out of my bedroom room is a two-way street, that means the villain I saw last night could have seen me seeing him wading through the very gravestones that I’m up to my waist in before he disappeared behind the Gilgood mausoleum with the limp body.
If I’d been staring out of any other upstairs window of the house, that dastard wouldn’t have noticed me in the shadows, but dang that powerful nightmare-repelling night-light I stole for Birdie from the five and dime! It lights up our bedroom like it’s the Miss America stage, and that murderer had a front-row seat!
Could I now be #1 on the perpetrator’s hit list?
With a bullet?
Of course, the bad guy would have no way of knowing for sure that I saw his face, and I have no way of knowing for sure that he saw mine, but I got to BE PREPARED for the worst.
Too crafty to come out in the open to knock at our back door so he could kill the kid who saw him out of her bedroom window last night, if I was him, I would bide my time and hide behind Mr. Gilgood’s final resting place and wait for me to show up to satisfy my curiosity so he could end my life before I could turn him in to the cops who would end his and . . . and my poor little sister is running straight into his murderous arms!
9
NO GUTS, NO GORY (NO JOKE)
I’m screaming, “Birdie! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!” but she keeps ripping toward the mausoleum that the kidnapping murderer could be hiding behind. I’m close enough to tackle her, but just like when I shove her through our milk chute to open our squeaky back door when Louise locks us out because she wants to have “a few minutes of peace,” this is one of the times in life when my sister’s featherweight tininess really pays off. The kid’s got fancier footwork than Daddy’s favorite boxer, Rocky Marciano. She’s bobbing and weaving so fast through the gravestones that erupt out of the grass that I can’t catch up to her until after she smacks the front of Mr. Gilgood’s final resting place with both of her hands and yells, “I win!”
I do not tell her, “Congratulations,” and dig a Hershey’s kiss out of my pocket.
I slam the Red Owl bag down at her feet, stomp on it, grab her T-shirt in my fist, and quietly hiss out, “Goddamnit all, Bird,” because the murderer could be right around the corner waiting to silence me for good. And then, of course, he wouldn’t stop there, would he? He’d need to murder my sister next, because she eyewitnessed him offing me. Daddy would roll over in his grave, if he could, if I let anybody harm one blah-brown hair on the head of his precious tweetheart. “I’m warnin’ you, ya run off like that on me again, cross my heart and hope to die, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“You’ll what, Tessie?” Birdie smarts back.
“I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” I’d die for her—might even be about to—but the only thing I want to do right this second is slap the smirk she’s got smeared across her face all the way to 84th St.!
I’m so bent out of shape that I even forget about the danger we might be in, and I let my temper do the talking. “Say you’re sorry!”
She sticks her tongue out at me, digs her hand deep into my shorts pocket, helps herself to a heaping handful of chocolate kisses, and singsongs, “I’m so, so, so, so sorry, Tessie, for not listening to you and running away,” but believe you me, the kid is not sorry, not even a smidgeon. Usually meek and mild Birdie is looking about as repentant as the gargoyle that’s glaring down at us from on top of the Gilgood mausoleum, because she is in the grips of #6:
SURE SIGNS OF LOONY
Seeing, hearing, and smelling stuff that nobody else can.
Acting more high-strung than a Kentucky Derby winner.
Wearing clothes that don’t go together.
Not understanding what’s going on in movies or television shows or the neighborhood.
Wetting the bed all the time sometimes.
Wild-streaking.
Extreme stubbornness.
Having a leaky memory and a drifting brain.
Not getting jokes and the ones they tell are lamer than Tiny Tim.
Murdering.
Drooling, when not asleep.
I hate it when she does this!
10:20 a.m. The famous saying “Life isn’t fair” couldn’t get any truer. Birdie is having a gay old time, throwing chocolate kisses up in the air and catching them in her wild-streaking smart-aleck mouth like they’re salted peanuts at Lonnigan’s Bar, and I’m left holding the bag in the graveyard, sweating bullets to come up with a they-went-thatta-way plan to escape a kidnapping killer who is probably already behind the mausoleum practicing his choking.
We could try to outrun him, but short-legged Birdie could never beat out a stork-legged man with murder on his mind, I don’t care how Marciano her footwork is. We could scream, but a fat lotta good that would do us. Mr. Gilgood avoided people like the plague when he was alive, and he must’ve put it in his Last Will and Testament that he be buried as far away as possible from everybody else, because Birdie and me are on the very edges of the cemetery. Nobody would hear us yelp for help. Even Gert Klement with her powerful hearing aids would be, pardon my French, shit outta luck. Not that she’d come running to rescue Birdie and me, no way, no how. That bad Samaritan would just smile to herself and mutter, My, oh, my. That sounds like the Finley sisters desperately yelling for assistance in the cemetery. I’d rush right over to save them, but they made their beds and now they can lie in them . . . at St. Anne’s Home for Wayward Girls and the county loony bin, and then she’d throw her head back, laugh evilly, and cut herself a great big piece of that devil’s food cake.
I close my eyes and plead for help.
Q. O, dear Magic 8 Ball, what useful advice can you offer me under these life-threatening circumstances?
A. Outlook not so good.
Well, that’s about as helpful as a rubber crutch.
What I need is some useful expert advice.
Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute.
What am I thinking?!
I do have some useful expert advice!
I haven’t read any pages yet in Modern Detection where it’s spelled out what a gumshoe should do if they find themselves trapped in this particular dangerous situation, but I’m 98% sure the New York City detective who wrote the book would recommend finding the nearest escape route, which, in Birdie’s and my case, would be through the #1 spookiest spot in the whole neighborhood. Phantom Woods.
Should we tiptoe past the mausoleum and slip into woods that even the sun and the streetlights are too scared to shine into? Run through those trees whose branches are so black and twisted that they remind me of German children getting eaten by witches in the fairy tales written by those brothers who certainly were named correctly—Grimm? No. That plan is
the perfect example of that famous saying “Jumping from the frying pan into the oven.”
What else could I do to save our hides?
Chapter Thirteen in the modern detecting book covers a subject that especially interests me, so I paged ahead, and thank all the angels that I did, because I’m pretty sure that TIPS FOR ASSUMING A FALSE IDENTITY is about to come in real handy!
If only I had thought to bring along the disguises that are so near and dear to us. The black wigs and scruffy beards that Daddy bought Birdie and me at Kenfield’s Five and Dime around this time last year so we could be hobos for Halloween. That was such a great night. After my sister and me counted up our candy and got out of our costumes, “Good Time Eddie” Finley couldn’t wait to treat his babies to a gruesome bedtime story he called “The Butcher of Keefe Ave.” After he got done giving us all the gory details and one of his tremendous good-night hugs and double Eskimo kisses, I got busy explaining to Birdie under our sheets that the story wasn’t really true the way Daddy told us it was. “He was just having some tricky Halloween fun, that’s all, honey.” But my sister wouldn’t quit whimpering, so I had to use my Roy Rogers flashlight to check under our bed for a butcher who escaped the insane asylum with a cleaver in his apron and . . . lo and behold! I know now that it was cows’ brains, but I almost threw up when I saw the bloody, raw hunk of something dripping away under our bed that night! I yanked Birdie out of bed and we hightailed it down Keefe Ave. screaming like two little chickens, “The Butcher is on the loose! The Butcher is on the loose! Run for your lives!” It wasn’t until we scrambled to hide under some bushes across the street that we heard our funny father laugh and shout off our front porch, “Gotcha!, girls.”
The Mutual Admiration Society Page 10