“You’ll never pull one over on that old lady,” Katharine said. “Besides Meemaw, what about his secretary? She knows Parker closed the business.”
“Libby? She’s so naive, she’ll believe anything I tell her. I’ll just say he closed it down because he was depressed,” Mary Bliss said quickly. “Having a midlife crisis.” She was making this up as she went along, enjoying herself. It was sort of fun. More fun than worrying about how she and Erin would live on a teacher’s salary.
“I didn’t want to say anything before,” Mary Bliss said, her tone hushed. “But Parker had a gambling problem. He was deeply in debt.”
“Parker McGowan?” Katharine giggled.
“He was leading a double life. A lot of those ‘consulting trips’ of his were really to Mississippi,” Mary Bliss said. “The blackjack tables.”
“Now I know you’ve lost your mind,” Katharine said. “Nobody would believe that.”
“But that part is really true,” Mary Bliss insisted. “He really did love to go to Tunica to play blackjack. I never told you because I was embarrassed. I mean, how low-rent. Tunica. Not even Vegas or Tahoe or Atlantic City. He went on these chartered bus trips.”
“Nice try,” Katharine said. “But it’s not working for me. Even if it is partly true.”
“I can show you the credit card receipts,” Mary Bliss offered.
“Not good enough,” Katharine said. “Reporting your husband dead is serious stuff, hon. Once you do it, you can’t take it back. You’ve gotta come up with a story that will stick. Something tragic, yet believable. And a body. What are you going to do about a body? And how about this—what if Parker changes his mind? Decides to come back and give marriage another shot? Or if he comes back and files for divorce?”
“He’s never coming back,” Mary Bliss said. “You don’t really know Parker. What he’s like inside. He must have been planning this thing for months. Years maybe. He took his contact lenses. Left his prescription glasses, all his business suits, still in the closet. I know Parker McGowan. He’s gone for good. So as far as I’m concerned, he’s dead.”
“But how?” Katharine repeated. “How does he die?”
“Violently,” Mary Bliss said. “He owes me that much.”
11
“It’s stuffy in here,” Mary Bliss said, fanning her face with her hands. “Or is that just me?”
Katharine shrugged. “Aren’t you too young for menopause? How old are you, anyway?”
“I’m thirty-eight, and no, I’m not going through menopause.” She got up and checked the air conditioner thermostat. “I’m roasting in here.”
“It’s Georgia,” Katharine reminded her. “Summertime.”
“I can’t breathe,” Mary Bliss said. “Let’s go outside.”
“Its ninety-two degrees outside, with about eleventy-hundred percent humidity,” Katharine said. “And what about the mosquitoes? You can’t see the sky for the swarms of mosquitoes.”
Mary Bliss opened the cupboard under the sink and handed Katharine a bottle of bug spray. She got two Diet Cokes out of the refrigerator and handed one to Katharine. “We drank all the wine. Here. Let’s go play in the sprinklers.”
They stepped outside and proceeded to mist themselves all over with the bug spray.
Katharine looked around appreciatively at Mary Bliss’s house.
It was a shingled bungalow, painted the darkest gray Mary Bliss could find, with the trim picked out in bright white, and the doors painted a glossy black. The McGowans’ house stood a little ways up a hummock, with a porch stretched across the front, with two big water oaks shading it. Mary Bliss kept red terra cotta planters on the porch steps brimming with ferns and green and white caladiums, and when the garden was overflowing, she left a basket by the front door, full of crookneck squash and zucchini and tomatoes, for any neighbors to help themselves to.
A sidewalk ran past at the bottom of the hill, and many was the night that Mary Bliss and Katharine sat up on the porch, hidden in the dense shade, trash-talking whoever was walking by. And they never even knew they were being discussed.
In the back, Mary Bliss had fenced the vegetable garden with a little cedar fence, and she’d hung a hammock between two sweet gum trees, and the sprinkler, an old-cast iron one she’d found in the garage when they’d moved in, swirled around and around, curved arms lowering and lifting with each rotation of the sprinkler, spraying the still evening air with the warm, sulfur-scented droplets.
Katharine leaned back against the back stoop and watched as Mary Bliss unbuttoned her sundress, let it fall around her ankles, and then stepped daintily out, as though she were in the better sportswear dressing room of the long-gone downtown Rich’s department store.
Mary Bliss ran toward the sprinkler, whooped as the cold water splashed her, then ran in circles—letting it soak her, stopping to thrust her hair into the spray, then skipping around, turning and whooping some more.
If this wasn’t a sight. Mary Bliss McGowan gone wild. Well, not wild enough to get teetotally naked, but certainly, she was running around in her Vanity Fair bra and modest white hip-hugger panties like an eighteen-year-old Chi O after her first kamikaze party. If the Shipsteads next door decided to come out on their backyard deck for some reason, they would get an eyeful of a nearly naked Mary Bliss McGowan.
“Are you drunk?” Katharine called.
“No,” Mary Bliss answered. “Come on, Kate, come get wet. It’s wonderful.”
“You ever hear of a bathing suit?” Katharine asked. “Or better yet, the shower in the privacy of your own home?”
“I’m getting baptized,” Mary Bliss said. She stood directly in front of the sprinkler, thrust her arms wide open, threw back her head, and opened her mouth wide, letting the water run in and sluice down her face.
“Baptized.” Katharine shook her head, smiling. Maybe there was hope for Mary Bliss yet. Maybe marriage to Parker McGowan hadn’t zombified her as totally as Katharine feared.
“In the name of the Father. And of the Son. And of the Holy Spirit,” Mary Bliss hollered, thrashing her wet hair this way and that. She was standing on her tippy-toes, hugging her arms across her chest. “I christen me, Me.”
She opened her eyes and smiled radiantly. Her hair was plastered to her head, her panties and bra transparent from the water.
She ran over to where Katharine sat on the porch stoop and shook her head like a dog, spraying Katharine with water.
“Stop,” Katharine laughed, holding up a hand to shield her makeup from melting. “You’re drunk or crazy, I don’t know which.”
“Neither,” Mary Bliss said. “Guess what? I know how to do it. I know how to get rid of Parker.”
“I can’t wait to hear,” Katharine said.
Mary Bliss grabbed her hand and tugged her to a standing position. “Come on,” she insisted. “You’ve got to get baptized too. Then I’ll tell you.”
12
“I’ve been baptized,” Katharine protested, but she was already unzipping her shorts, pulling her T-shirt over her head. “Anyway, I’m Catholic, and we’re not into total immersion.”
“This is sprinkling, Catholics believe in sprinkling, don’t they?” Mary Bliss asked. Suddenly she had an answer to everything.
Katharine cringed as the first spray of cold water sliced across her face, chest, and thighs.
“Come on,” Mary Bliss said. “You’ve got to keep moving. Do like I do.”
So Katharine Weidman, age forty-five, found herself doing some kind of rain dance in the backyard of her best friend’s house—wearing nothing but her black lace thong panties and Wonderbra.
When they’d danced and laughed themselves near dead, they went inside and put their dry clothes on again.
Katharine made a face when she saw the lukewarm casserole of chili-roni; instead she ordered beef Kowloon and garlic prawns and hot-and-sour soup from the Chinese delivery place up the street, and charged it to Charlie’s Visa.
“So?”
Katharine asked when they were down to the fortune cookies.
Mary Bliss adjusted the towel covering her hair. “Hmm?”
“The plan. You said you had a plan, for taking care of Parker. I got baptized, now I want to hear your plan.”
“Accidental death,” Mary Bliss said. “It’s the best way.”
“And what about a body? No insurance company is going to pay death benefits without a body.”
“I know,” Mary Bliss said. “So it has to be an accident where the body is never found. But nothing too sensational, you know? Nothing where there would be a big police investigation. So that lets out something like a plane crash or a fire or something like that.”
“What’s left?” Katharine asked.
“Well…,” Mary Bliss said. “Do you ever watch that Discovery Channel on cable?”
“No,” Katharine said firmly. “I am not interested in the mating habits of sperm whales, or quantum physics or snowstorms in the Himalayas or any of that kind of thing. Anyway, I thought you only watched PBS.”
“And Discovery,” Mary Bliss said. “It’s very educational. Anyway, a couple of years ago, when Parker first started traveling so much, I saw this true crime–type program. You know, it’s not only science and nature on there. Anyway, this time I was watching, it was a show about this cute little married couple from Oklahoma. The wife was this kind of plain-looking girl, and the husband was a big brawny type. Anyway, they got married, and on their honeymoon, they went on one of those windjammer sailing trips, down in the Bahamas. They were way out at sea, and a big storm came up, real suddenly. And the husband radioed for help, that something had gone wrong with the sails, but all of a sudden, a big wave swept over the boat, swamped it, and the boat broke in half, and they were both swept into the water.”
“I bet I know what happened,” Katharine said, out of patience. “The wife drowned, and the husband survived. Is that what happened?”
“Just let me finish,” Mary Bliss said, taking her own sweet time. “No, Miss Smarty-pants. Actually, the wife was able to grab a life jacket. When the Coast Guard came out looking for them, they found her, passed out from the heat and all, but they never did find him.”
Katharine gave her a fishy look. “The husband died? Are you sure you got that right?”
“Dead sure,” Mary Bliss said defiantly. “And when she got back to Oklahoma, or wherever it was that they lived, she cashed in a two-million-dollar life insurance policy they’d taken out, just before the wedding.”
“What’s the catch?” Katharine asked. “Are you telling me she planned the whole thing?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mary Bliss said. “It was her idea to take the sailing trip. They took a weekend sailing school together, down in Florida, a couple of months before the wedding. And that’s where she met the other guy.”
“There was another guy?” Katharine asked, sitting up straighter. “You didn’t say there was another guy.”
“She had to have an accomplice,” Mary Bliss explained. “So she seduced this sailing instructor she met down in Florida. His name was Lars. When the couple went out on the windjammer, Lars followed them in another boat. And when they got far enough out to sea, she fixed her husband a drink, and of course she’d put some kind of tranquilizer or something in it, so he got real woozy. And when he’d about passed out, she radioed Lars on the other boat.”
“What happened next?”
“Lars got on the sailboat’s radio and acted like he was the husband. And when the wind really picked up, they just sort of slid the husband overboard. And he sank like a rock. So the wife puts on her life jacket, and they did something to the sail, to break it somehow, to make it look like the wind did it. Then the wife got on Lars’s boat while the storm was really bad, and when it died down, she got on the life raft and acted all stunned and confused.”
“What about Lars?”
“He got on his own radio and contacted the Coast Guard, and they told him they’d heard the distress call and were on the way. So he backed on off and let them rescue her.”
“Slick,” Katharine said. “But, how did they get caught?”
“It turns out neither of them was as bright as they thought,” Mary Bliss said with a sigh. “The husband’s mother was a real bitch. She never liked the wife. The mother-in-law hired a private investigator. He started following the wife, and of course found out everything.”
“And they got caught.”
“Lars turned state’s evidence,” Mary Bliss said. “He told the police it was all the wife’s idea. She got a life sentence, Lars got six to fifteen.”
Now Katharine sighed. “Good story. But, hon, let’s face it, they got caught. You don’t want to do anything like what they did.”
“No,” Mary Bliss said. “My plan is different. I just got it from thinking about that program. I was thinking about a scuba diving accident. Down in Cozumel.”
Katharine thought about it.
“I didn’t know Parker liked to scuba dive.”
“We took lessons years ago. At the Y. We both got certified, we even went on a couple dive trips to the Cayman Islands. We’ve even still got our equipment, up in the attic.”
“Why Cozumel?” Katharine asked.
“I saw another program,” Mary Bliss started to say.
Katharine held up her hand. “Just cut to the chase, please. I can’t take another of your shaggy dog stories.”
Mary Bliss stuck out her tongue. “In Mexico,” she said deliberately, “they have a very lax and corrupt law enforcement. You can get anything you want down there for the right amount of money. Like a death certificate for a hundred bucks.”
“Is that so?” Katharine asked.
“I saw it on the Discovery Channel,” Mary Bliss said.
“This could work,” Katharine said. “It really could work. We go down to Cozumel, check into a nice hotel. One that has filtered water. You don’t want to get Montezuma’s revenge. We do some shopping, buy some nice silver jewelry, then buy the fake death certificate and fake Parker’s death.”
“We?” Mary Bliss’s eyebrow was raised way up near her hairline.
“You’ve got to have an accomplice,” Katharine pointed out. “And I was born to do this.”
13
Mary Bliss considered the remains of the Chinese takeout in their neat cardboard boxes. Half a container of fried rice, most of the shrimp, and two limp-looking egg rolls. In a former life, she would have tossed them in the trash with the empty Coke cans.
But that was before her baptism into the Church of the Necessary. She’d been sprinkled with the cold water of reality, and now, as she looked down at the leftovers, she saw her checkbook balance and the contents of her billfold and was born again. Doctored up with a little stir-fried chicken and maybe some soy sauce, there was enough here for a meal for herself and Erin.
Carefully, she scraped the rice and shrimp into little Tupperware dishes and nestled them on the top shelf of the refrigerator. She avoided looking too closely at what those shelves held. Whatever was there would have to do until payday. No more quick trips to the grocery store to pick up some nice steaks to grill, or a pretty piece of salmon to poach. When she and Parker had married all those years ago, she’d been an expert at the art of making do, tutored by her mother, the world’s thriftiest single mom.
She and Parker had lived off of meatloaf stretched with oatmeal, tuna-noodle casseroles, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Most of the dishes she cooked came out of a little red tin file box her mother had filled with index cards on which she had laboriously printed out dozens of her favorite recipes.
Meemaw had fussed at Mary Bliss about making Parker live off of “poorhouse rations,” but Parker had proclaimed himself a lucky man to have such a clever bride.
Somewhere along the way, she’d discarded most of those old, grease-spattered recipe cards, counting them too greasy, too fatty, too “tacky” compared to the gourmet fare served up at the Fair Oaks Supper Club and the fan
cy restaurants Parker favored.
Mary Bliss gazed around her kitchen, and she wondered what had become of her red recipe tin. When had she last seen it? She squatted on the floor beside the bookshelves that held her fancy cookbooks, letting her fingers trail across the spines of The Joy of Cooking and The Silver Palate and various Junior League cookbooks she’d acquired over the years. She thought about the quiches, the salsas, the pasta salads she’d produced from those books. Her own mother had laughed out loud the first time Mary Bliss had offered her a taste of the pasta salad she planned to serve to her Sunday school class.
Mary Bliss could see Nina now, her hair neatly combed, the sensible shoes and silver-rimmed glasses. Her mother had been old before thirty, had lived a quiet life of church and work at the elementary school cafeteria, never caused a fuss, and at the age of not quite fifty, she got sick and died quietly in a matter of weeks.
She’d never even seen Erin, Mary Bliss thought. Never held her only grandchild. And Erin had never known any of her mother’s kin. The McGowans were all the family she knew.
Erin. Mary Bliss stood up, looked at the kitchen clock. It was nearly midnight.
She thought back to her glib planning session with Katharine. It had been fun, delicious, really, to talk about how to kill off Parker. Another quick stab of pain in her ribs. Erin. How would she tell her daughter?
Everybody said it. Erin was her daddy’s girl. The light of his life. It was the family joke. For her sixteenth birthday, Parker had had a ring made for her, an opal, her birthstone, surrounded by tiny diamonds. And on the inside of the ring, he’d had engraved DLP. Daddy’s Little Princess.
Little Bitty Lies Page 6