by Tonya Kappes
The idea of it brought tears to my eyes. Most teenage girls had posters of hot Hollywood celebrities on their walls. Not me. Every year I was in high school, I saved my allowance and bought two yearbooks. I used one to cut out all the photos of Jack Henry and plaster them on my wall. I used the other for what few friends I had to sign, trying to fit in and not be the “creepy funeral-home girl.”
I wasn’t one who needed to be made over, nor did I want him to beg me to talk to him. He knew me. He knew I needed time. Granted, I would be ready to talk to him tomorrow, but for tonight, I wanted to be alone.
“That boy loves you.” Mamie Sue Preston stood behind me, looking over my shoulder.
In silence we watched the cruiser headlights pull out of Eternal Slumber’s driveway.
“Come on.” I walked back to my efficiency.
It was time I took care of Mamie Sue. Jack Henry might have left for the night, but tomorrow he’d be all over me about my new Betweener client and what I knew.
It was funny how my relationship with Jack Henry had started when I’d gone to him about my first Betweener client. We were able to separate business from pleasure. I was sure tomorrow he would show up at my door in business mode.
I grabbed the Baggie with Mamie’s teeth, along with the hearse keys. I had a date with a gravestone.
My daddy always told me to keep an emergency kit in the back of the hearse. When he and Mom moved to Florida, he gave me the kit, since I was taking over his part of the job. Mom had had the cushy job like Charlotte Rae.
My kit included a flashlight, extra batteries, hammer, screwdriver, blanket, jumper cables, tire gauge, bottled water, and a bag of trail mix, which had to be outdated by now.
The tools might seem strange, but you never know when a casket decides not to work properly or there might be a screw loose that needs to be tightened. Sounds strange, but, like everything in life, shit happens.
The Sleepy Hollow cemetery was locked up at night. We didn’t have a caretaker who lived on the grounds, so it would be easy to slip in even if I wasn’t in a hearse. Thankfully I had a key to the gate for emergency purposes. I was one of three who had a key. The city, O’Dell Burns and me. At times it was good to be an undertaker, and now was one of them.
I got the gate open and pulled in. I got back out to lock the gate back up. I didn’t want any unwanted visitors in there, nor did I want someone to see the gate was open and call the police.
The headstones lined both sides of the road. Several different roads forked off the main one, but I kept going straight because Mamie was in the old section of the cemetery.
She sat still in the passenger seat with her hands neatly folded in her lap.
“You know . . .” She looked out the window. Her voice was almost a whisper. “. . . I’m not sure why anyone would want to kill me. I never bothered a soul. I was a pillar of the community.”
“I’m sorry. People do mean things for no reason.” I still didn’t have a clear picture of a motive unless it was money. “Why did you leave money to the church?”
“Why not?” she asked back.
“I have never seen them do anything to acknowledge it,” I said.
“Maybe I didn’t want it to be acknowledged. Maybe they don’t know it was me.” She said a lot without saying a lot.
“Anonymous?” I asked.
“You can say that.” She pulled back her shoulders and straightened up a little when we got to her stone. “Like I told you earlier, it was mine to do with what I wanted.”
It was refreshing to know Mamie donated a large sum of money to the church. Granny was wrong about Mamie Sue. But I wasn’t about to tell Granny that.
I grabbed the Baggie with Mamie’s teeth in it and my bag of tricks from the back of the hearse and walked over to her stone. She was propped back on top with her legs crossed, like she was when I first saw her.
“I do love this bell.” She flicked it a few times with her finger.
The sun had set and dusk was upon us, making it difficult to see the small hole where the bell string disappeared. I took the flashlight out of the bag and shone it on the hole.
“You know.” Mamie paused and hopped off the stone. She ran her palm over the top of her name. “It’s strange seeing my grave.”
“I’m sorry.” I had a strange feeling I needed to tell her how sorry I was she was murdered and how no one ever deserved to be killed.
“Enough about that.” She waved her bony hands in the air. “Get to my teeth.”
“Gross.” My nose curled when I took the teeth out of the bag. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
I didn’t know what happened to the dead once I got them six feet under, and I didn’t care. Evidently they took the items in their casket with them to the other side.
“Positive.” She rubbed her hands together in anticipation. “Now, get them in that hole.” She instructed me, pointing to the dime-sized hole.
“The hole is tiny.” I manipulated the end of the teeth in the opening. The teeth were much larger than the hole. “Does this hole go all the way into your casket?”
Suddenly I felt like I should have done more research on this type of casket setup.
“The hole into the casket is bigger.” She did a shimmy shake. “All sorts of bugs can get in there, but I didn’t care as long as I had that bell.”
She shooed me to continue to try to get the teeth in the hole. No matter how many times I jabbed, turned, and thought, the teeth weren’t going to fit.
“Use your hammer to make the hole bigger and wiggle them in.” Mamie swung her legs and tapped the kit with her cane.
The hammer wasn’t going to work because I would tear up the stone, then I’d get in trouble for messing with a corpse, which was illegal. I could use the screwdriver.
I put the tip of the screwdriver on the edge of the marble hole and slowly chiseled the hole until it was big enough to get the tip of the teeth in it. I wiggled the teeth until they finally dropped entirely underground.
“We did it!” Excitement filled me, and I looked up at Mamie.
“We sure did.” She smiled with the biggest and brightest teeth I had ever seen on a ghost. “Aren’t they gorgeous?” She moved her head side to side with her mouth wide open. “I paid good money for these babies.”
“You look beautiful.” I smiled.
“Oh, ah, oh, ah.” She opened her mouth and closed it several times, letting out an ominous sound.
Her hands pulled and tugged on the skin on her neck as though she was stretching it, then she put her fingers on her cheeks and moved them around in a circular motion, as if she were exercising her face.
“It’s a bitch getting old and getting saggy skin.” She opened her mouth really wide and closed it a couple times. “I spent a lot of money on beauty products to keep this skin tight.”
The moon decided to come out. It shone down like a spotlight. I walked over to Mamie and took a good look at her.
“You look great as a ghost.” I noticed she had much tighter skin than most women her age.
“I could use my face cream.” Her eyes slid to me.
“Forget it.” I shook my head and gathered my kit. “I got your teeth in there, I’m not putting facial cream down there.”
The entire way back to the funeral home, I couldn’t help but smile. The only thing I could see in the dark was Mamie Sue Preston’s teeth from her smiling the entire way home.
My argument with Jack Henry played over in my head, making it hard for me to even think about going to sleep that night. Mamie Sue disappeared, and I could only imagine she was enjoying having her teeth back in her mouth. It was only ten o’clock. Instead of trying to force myself to go to sleep, I decided to write down the pieces of Mamie’s life and how they fit together, in order to help me find her killer.
I wrote, “
Mamie Sue Preston was the wealthiest woman in Sleepy Hollow. How did she get her money? She died a virgin. She had a maid, Dixie Dunn, who she left her estate to. Why would she leave her big house to her maid?”
“Dixie Dunn.” I tapped the name with my pencil. “Dixie Dunn holds the answers.”
It seemed Dixie Dunn had had the most to gain from Mamie Sue dying, so I stuck her on the top of my list.
I glanced at the clock. It wasn’t good manners to make social calls at ten o’clock at night, but who said I had good manners?
The full moon hung high on my way back to Mamie’s fancy neighborhood. I had never been to Beulah’s home, and the address on the Auxiliary invitation was not too far from Mamie’s mansion.
Beulah Paige’s house was dark. I didn’t see her fancy red Cadillac in her driveway, though it was probably in her detached garage, which was a mini version of her house. Mini, meaning it was as big as Eternal Slumber.
The front porch light flipped on after I beat on the door for a few minutes.
“Who is here at this hour?” Beulah’s voice asked but the face didn’t match Beulah’s. “Emma Lee, do you know what time it is?”
“What happened to your face?” My eyes squinted. Maybe it was the lighting making her face so white. “Did you lose your tan?”
Beulah Paige was the Queen of Fake. Fake smile, fake niceness, fake eyelashes, and fake tan.
“What do you want?” she asked. Want came out as “wunt” with her disgusted tone of voice.
She shifted. Her black silk robe with the leopard fur around the edges hiked up on her full hips, lifting it above her ankles. In true Beulah fashion, she had on low-heeled slippers with a leopard puff on the top.
“I want to know what is on your face,” I said.
She was scary-looking. The heavy white cream she was wearing looked like the same stuff Granny made Momma smear on my nose when we went to the swimming pool when I was a kid. Up against Beulah’s red hair, it made her look like a clown. I didn’t like clowns.
“It’s my night cream to keep the wrinkles at bay.” She huffed and held the door tight against her body. “Go home. I need my beauty sleep. I will see you here tomorrow night. Not that I’m looking forward to it.”
She went to shut the door. I put my hand on it to stop it.
“I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Dixie.” I put my toe on the bottom of the door so she couldn’t slam it in my face.
“What on earth do you want to know at ten o’clock at night?” she asked.
“Who did she work for before?” I asked.
“I don’t know or care.” She blinked her black lashes. They were so long that she blinked cream right on them. “Good night.”
She tried to shut the door, and we played the tango game, where I stopped her.
“Is she a business, or does she just work for herself?” I asked.
Beulah let out a big sigh. “Emma Lee, I’m tired. Don’t mistake my accent for ignorance. Why are you here?”
“Charlotte Rae is on my ass about getting a person who can clean, and when I met Dixie at Junior’s funeral, I thought she might have some friends or work for some company I can call.” This lying stuff was getting easier and easier.
“I pay her under the table. The only thing I know is she shows up at seven in the morning and leaves around seven at night.” Her foot slid out from underneath her robe. Gently she tapped it on the tile floor. “I guess I could find out, because your sister is definitely in need of an attitude adjustment.”
“What?” I asked, wondering what had crawled up Beulah’s butt.
“I gave her an invitation to the Auxiliary, and she snubbed me.” Beulah drew in a breath. “The nerve thinking she is better than me.”
She rolled her eyes and drew her hands to her chest at the same time.
“Oh.” I smirked. “She does have an air about her. But, I wanted to know if I could get Dixie’s contact information, since Charlotte’s on me?”
“Hold on.” She shut the door.
I heard the tapping of her shoes on the tile floor. Charlotte Rae had failed to mention the invitation. And it sort of made me mad. They were going to extend her an invitation and not me?
I pulled out of my thoughts when the door clicked open.
“You know.” There was a puzzled look in her eyes. “I don’t even have a number for her.”
“How did you hire her?” I asked.
“There was this girl who came to the door telling me about her.” Beulah bit her bottom lip, her brows crossed, as though she was thinking.
“A girl?” I asked. “What did the girl say?”
“She wanted to know if I had a cleaning lady, because she knew someone who cleaned the big house a few doors down.” She leaned her body on her arm, holding on to the doorknob.
“A few doors down?” I knew she was talking about Mamie’s, but Mamie had been dead for a while. Where had Dixie worked between Mamie and Beulah? That was the time frame I needed.
“People around here are always changing up their cleaning crew.” She shrugged. “She offered me a deal. The next day Dixie showed up.”
“Where was the girl?” I asked.
“I have no idea. I haven’t seen her since.” She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I need to go to bed. You are giving me a headache.”
“Before I go”—I didn’t budge—“are you sure Dixie isn’t with a cleaning service?”
“I told you already. As long as she does a good job, and judging by how fast everyone gobbled up the chess pie at Junior’s repast, I’m thinking she’s doing a fine job. I don’t ask questions. You can ask her for some referrals tomorrow when you come back for the meeting, but you ain’t taking her from me,” she warned and waved her fingers in the air before she shut the door.
Seeing Beulah gave me more questions than answers. Now I wanted to know exactly who the first girl was who came to Beulah’s door. She had to be part of Dusting Dixies.
Where had Dixie been for the past few years between Mamie and Beulah? Who did Mamie hang around with when she was alive? Who were her friends? According to her, no one, but everyone has to have at least one friend. What did Pastor Brown do with the million dollars?
Maybe the answers to some of the questions were the missing pieces I needed to figure out who’d had motive to kill Mamie. How did she die?
One thing I did know, I was going to be sitting in the front pew of Sleepy Hollow Baptist Church come sunrise.
Chapter 14
Ithink hell has just frozen over.” Beulah Paige Bellefry hugged her Bible close to her chest when I passed her and the other Auxiliary women standing on the front steps of Sleepy Hollow Baptist Church.
“Amen,” I cheered and stopped on their step. “Is this the greeting committee? Or is this a come to Jesus meeting?”
“That is not funny, Emma Lee. I don’t have time to listen to your cockamamie bull malarkey today. I have a headache.” Beulah Paige brushed her fancy gloved hands down her cream suit. She had a hot pink blouse underneath for a pop of color. “We are in the house of the Lord.”
“Actually, we are outside.” I stared at her eyes. There wasn’t one wrinkle. That heavy moisturizer must be working, and there was no way I was going to tell her she looked good.
Granny nudged me. She gave me the stink-eye.
“What?” I shrugged and used my fingers to help fluff up her matted-down hair. “God doesn’t have a sense of humor? You really need to carry a comb if you insist on using a tight helmet.” I referred to the aviator leather helmet she tugged over her head instead of a hard helmet.
Granny’s lips pinched together. She hugged her pocketbook a little tighter to her body.
Mable Claire, Hettie Bell and Cheryl Lynne Doyle laughed.
Ahem, Beulah cleared her throat. We all steppe
d aside to make way for all the other churchgoers who were walking into the sanctuary.
“Say,” I leaned my head and glanced over at the side entrance of the church. “Isn’t that your maid?”
“I’ll be,” Beulah sucked in a breath and smiled. “I invited her, and I’m glad she decided to come.”
We all went inside. I made sure I got a bulletin and walked down the main aisle to the front. The pews on both sides were full from the front to the back. It was like social time. Everyone with a happy face, greeting everyone.
There were a lot of people I didn’t know and a lot of people I did. The stares from people I didn’t know didn’t bother me. The stares from people I did know bothered me.
“Deep in the valley the stone rolled away!” a voice sang out. It was familiar.
I looked but didn’t see who was singing when service hadn’t even started.
Granny grabbed my elbow and nodded her head to the front. Doc Clyde and Ina Claire were sitting in the front pew. I would get a good view right up Pastor Brown’s nostrils.
“The stone rolled away!” The singing voice was closer. “Rolled away!”
The expressions on Doc Clyde’s and Ina Claire’s faces were indescribable. If I wasn’t mistaken, I thought Ina Claire was looking up to the heavens to make sure a lightning bolt didn’t come down and strike me dead when I sat down next to her.
“Amen,” I leaned over to her and whispered.
She harrumphed and kept her eyes straight ahead.
“Deep in the valley the stone rolled away!” The voice was louder.
“Who is that singing off key?” I laughed.
“What?” Doc Clyde leaned around Granny and asked.
“That singing.” I put my finger in my ear to block the noise.
“Yes.” Doc Clyde slowly nodded his head. “The singing. Right, Zula Fae?”
Granny’s entire body tensed. She cleared her throat and shimmied her butt into the pew, straightening her body.