Except for a few hugs at church now and then, I don’t get touched a lot, and I weren’t sure I was going to be comfortable having some stranger a’rubbing on me, but a nice lady named Tracy started working out all the kinks in my shoulders and back and asked me what in the world I’d been doing to be so knotted up.
That’s all she asked, but it surely did unleash a flood of words. I don’t know what got into me. I started telling her everything. She heard about my selfish brother, and Carla, and that whole mess of finding a dead body on the train to San Antonio. Don’t know if she bothered to listen to a word I said, but by the time that girl was done, I was purring like my old stray tom cat the first time I gave him a whole can of tuna all for his own self.
I’m not sure I’d ever have gotten off that table if she hadn’t told me she was done. She showed me the way to the locker rooms, me with that sheet wrapped around me, dragging it behind me like a draggled-tail chicken, but happy as a clam I was feeling so good.
I pulled the curtain closed behind me, dropped my sheet on the white wooden chair, inserted my handy-dandy little key that was dangling from the twisty thing on my wrist into the lock, and the locker didn’t open.
I grabbed hold of the locker handle and shook it a bit trying to get it unstuck. That’s when I realize two things at once. I had stuck my key into number 39 instead of number 40, and there was a tiny piece of purple shiny material sticking out of number 39. Unfortunately, my shaking had loosened the door enough that it suddenly flung itself open and a body came tumbling out.
Someone had gone and stuck that little purple-bathing-suited Asian girl inside that locker. I know it only took about a second, but for me, time stood still. I watched that poor girl unfold out onto the floor like it was a slow-motion movie.
I hate to admit it, but I acted like a complete nut. I grabbed my damp sheet, held it up to my chest like it could protect me from whoever had done this terrible thing, and then I backed out of that little cubicle screaming my fool head off.
After that, one of my dizzy spells hit. As I passed out flat on the floor my last thought as I lay there was, “Somebody sure did put a lot of time and thought into laying out this pretty tile floor.”
It ain’t every day that a dead body is found in the Buckstaff. In fact, I think this might have been the only time ever. Lucky me. I sure hope I don’t become a murder magnet like that Miss Jane Marple in all them Agatha Christie novels I used to read when I was a girl. I remember thinking that if I was one of Miss Marple’s friends I’d a’high-tailed it away from that woman as fast as I could since there always seemed to be a dead body showing up every time she took a trip or went to a party.
I woke up from my dizzy spell shivering something awful, with Mira sitting there on the floor in her street clothes patting me and telling me to wake up and one of them police women feeling for a pulse like she thought I was dead. I sat straight up and saw a policeman kneeling beside the dead body and the staff standing around looking upset and miserable. I was awful relieved to find out that Mira had managed to cover the important parts of me up with that sheet. Pretty sure I didn’t accidentally land all that modest.
An Asian man was crying in the corner with a policeman standing there patting him on the shoulder. I recognized him as the man who’d stood in front of us at the desk while the Asian woman signed them in. He was damp and disheveled and looked like he’d just been drug up from the floor beneath where the men-folk got their spa treatments.
I glanced up at LaToya. Her face was set in stone and she didn’t look at me or smile. Tracy weren’t paying any attention to me either, even though she’d been awful kind-acting when she was giving me my massage. Only Mira seemed to really care that I was laying there on the floor. When you get right down to it, the only people you can depend on is nearly always your own kin folk.
“How are you feeling Aunt Doreen?” Mira asked.
“With my fingers.” I weren’t really trying to be smart-alecky, I just didn’t want to get into a rehash of my dizziness problem right now. “I need my clothes.”
“They won’t let you have them yet,” Mira said. “Your clothes are in the locker where they have everything taped off. And…that girl hasn’t been moved yet.”
“I need me some clothes.” I insisted.
“Can my aunt have her clothes?” Mira asked the nearest officer. “She’s cold and she’s had a shock.” Her voice took on a warning tone. “Her son, Owen, is an attorney and has a real short fuse when it comes to his mother. I sure wouldn’t want to be you or the owners of the Buckstaff if Miss Doreen here ends up in the hospital over this.”
“Owen?” I blinked. That fall must have knocked something loose in my brain. I didn’t remember having a son, let alone one named Owen.
“Yes, Aunt Doreen.” Mira winked at me real solemn and meaningful-like. “You know how Own gets when it comes to you and your health.”
It weren’t right for her to lie like that, but as fast-thinking as Mira was, I could see why she was such a good saleswoman that she got to drive a pink mini-van around the city. The mention of my new son, Owen-the-lawyer, made the staff make things move fast.
The next thing I knew, I was dressed in the same kind of clothes that the staff wore—kind of like them shirts and pants that nurses wear—except these had the Buckstaff logo on them instead of little tiger and fishies like some of the nurses wear back home over across the bridge at Southern Ohio Medical Center. Someone even found me a pair of clean fuzzy socks and some slippers. Some underwear woulda been real nice, too, but beggers can’t be choosers.
Like I said. The staff was all there, crowded around. Their expressions were a combination of being sick at heart, and sheer curiosity.
“Who was in charge of this dead woman?” one of the cops asked.
LaToya stepped forward. “Me.”
“Do you have any idea what happened to her?”
“No, sir,” LaToya said. “I’d left her sitting in the massage room to wait for Tracy to finish with Miss Sizemore.”
Tracy spoke up. “When I finished with the Sizemore woman and came out to get the girl who ended up….well, you know…she wasn’t there. Me and LaToya both thought she’d changed her mind about the massage and went home. That’s happened a few times when someone getting a massage groans a little too hard.”
At that point, Tracy shot a stony glance at me like I’d done something wrong. Well, I might have groaned a little. The massage had felt good. I was just trying to let her know I appreciated it.
A policeman started questioning me then and I wished I had something to tell him, but I didn’t. Just that I got mixed up on the lockers and had found a dead girl in one of them. I left out the part about me screaming my fool head off. I did not think it had any bearing on the case.
Mira wanted to get me out of there but I dug in my heels. Maybe it didn’t matter to her, but I wanted my own clothes that I’d stuffed in that locker, and I was going to wait until they let me have it. My pocket-book that Carla gave me was in there, too. It didn’t have a lot of money in it, but it did have my driver’s license and even though I can’t drive real good anymore because of the dizzy spells, I didn’t want to lose it. I was afraid the people at the DMV wouldn’t give me another one.
About that time, I saw a man coming in dressed in street clothes. He took one look at the dead girl sprawled out on the floor in her purple bathing suit and let out a loud sob.
“Darling!” he said. “Who did this to you?”
Of course, she didn’t answer because of being dead and all.
Then he started fighting his way toward her while staff and police people tried to hold him back.
I kept wracking my brain, trying to figure out why he looked so familiar. I lost track of Mira for a while. Then I saw she’d wandered off and was looking out the window at the city of Hot Springs. Just as well. Things were getting kinda cramped where I was.
“Mira?” I walked over to her, just as the man collapsed onto th
e floor, sobbing and LaToya tried to offer him a cup of that iced hot mineral water. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” She turned her face toward me and I saw she’d been crying again. “It’s just so crowded I thought I’d get out of the way. Are you ready to leave now?”
“I was ready to leave the minute that girl’s body came falling out of the locker.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll head on downstairs and bring the car up to the front so you won’t have to walk so far.”
“What about my pocketbook and things?”
“Give them this.” She handed me her pink Mary Kay business card. “Tell them to call us when they’re finished and I’ll come get your things.”
They were so busy trying to calm the man down, the police woman who had been patting my hand didn’t pay a whole lot of attention when I handed her Mira’s pink card.
“We’ll be in touch,” she said, and slipped it into her pocket.
Mira didn’t make me sleep in the king-sized bed with her that night. She’d calmed down some by then. I figured that maybe getting dunked in all that mineral water had been good for her.
As for me, although all that mineral water had felt real good at the time, I was all knotted up again because of finding that poor dead girl’s body. I couldn’t stop thinking about who could have done it. LaToya was a big woman, but she weren’t fat. She was muscular. I’d felt that strength when she helped me get out of that big bathtub.
Tracy was a strong woman, too. You’d have to be strong doing all the massaging she done in a day. It took some muscle to put the kind of pressure on my back that she’d done. And to do that all day long every day? She had to have some strength.
I had heard one of the policemen saying they thought the girl’s neck had been broken. It takes some strength to break a person’s neck. How do I know this? Because I used to help Mama wring chicken’s necks before cooking them for Sunday dinner. A human neck had to be a lot harder than that because a chicken’s neck is a lot skinnier.
LaToya hadn’t been looking all that sympathetic when I’d seen her standing there. Tracy had just seemed annoyed. I hadn’t seen enough of the other staff members to read them very well.
I wished I could figure out who had killed the girl, and then go talk to the police about it, but I weren’t a Miss Marple who could astonish the police people with her clues and revelations. I was just plain Doreen Sizemore from South Shore, Kentucky who had the bad luck—twice—of finding a dead body where there shouldn’t be one.
Even though I was as tired as a tail-chasing hound dog, I didn’t sleep well that night. It weren’t only because of the murder either, even though that didn’t help my peace of mind none. I hate to admit it in mixed company, but I got the trots that night. Bad.
If you don’t know what “the trots” are, that’s Kentucky-speak for having to go number two a lot. It comes from trotting back and forth to the outhouse. Except I didn’t have to use the outhouse. I had my pick of Mira’s four shiny bathrooms. I was too sick to appreciate having so much variety. I just used the one right beside my bedroom. An old woman doesn’t always have the best control in the world and I figured I’d better get there fast. My stomach cramped and hurt all night long.
Well, I didn’t die that night. In the morning Mira got on her computer, did a little reading, and told me that from what she could see, sometimes people get diarrhea when they have a good massage because it releases poisons in their body and them poisons have to come out somewhere. That was news to me. If that was what was happening, I surely must have had a lot of toxins in me and I knew who to blame—namely, Ralph. That brother of mine would make anyone’s body toxic.
Mira left early that morning on an emergency beauty call and left me to finish my toast and jam all by my lonesome.
I was finishing the dishes and pondering what a beauty emergency was, when the doorbell rang. I didn’t know how to load Mira’s dishwasher, so I was washing them by hand. I dried my hands off with a dishtowel and went to answer the doorbell, but I was careful. I made sure I looked out the window first. I saw two police people, a woman and a man standing there.
Now I seen enough TV shows to ask to see their badges—which they showed me. Problem was, I never seen a badge close up before so I didn’t know if they was real or not. For all I knew, them badges could have been out of a Cracker-Jack box. But they looked real, and the police people looked real, so I took a chance and invited them in.
I hoped maybe they’d brought my things from the locker, but they said my things would have to stay at the crime scene a while longer. I couldn’t see how my skivvies and dog-eared social security card could help them with figuring out who killed Miss Purple Bathing Suit, so I wished them good-luck with that.
They didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave, though. So I tried to be patient and wait for them to come out with whatever it was they wanted to say. They asked where Mira was and kinda smiled when I told them she had gone to help someone who was having a beauty emergency, her being a Mary Kay consultant and all.
What they said next threw me for a loop, though. They wanted to search the house.
I was just flabbergasted. Search Mira’s house? What did they think they were going to find? An illegal shade of lipstick?
I gave them permission though. I knew Mira didn’t have nothing to hide except a broken heart, and my own life has always been an open book. It’s had to be, living in South Shore and all where everyone knows everyone else’s business pretty much all the time. At least it’s been an open book up until them accidental bikini panties I stuffed down deep in the trashcan so Horace wouldn’t see them.
Anyway, they made a sort of hunt through the house, but the only thing they took was Mira’s computer that was in her bedroom. I tried to protest, saying she used it for her Mary Kay business, but they said they needed it. I told them I was pretty sure Mira would be mad about that. They said to call my son, Owen, the attorney if she had a problem with it. It might have been my imagination, but it seemed like one of the officers kinda smirked when he said that--like he knew Owen was a figment of Mira’s imagination.
I felt bad about that. I was kind of warming up to the idea of having a son named Owen.
Well, seeing that computer walk out the door in the arms of the police was pretty upsetting to me because I knew it was all my fault. I should have told them they needed a search warrant instead of just letting them look around inside like the dummy I am. Even though I don’t have no attorney son I ain’t completely ignorant about the law. I watch TV.
I wandered into Mira’s bedroom after that and stood there and stared at the spot on the table where she’d kept her computer. I kept wishing I could go back and do things differently from the moment the doorbell rang. For one thing, I probably would have minded my own business and not opened the door.
Mira had made a little office out of one corner, even though she had rooms to spare, and it surely looked bare without the computer there. Then I noticed something else about her room. There was a picture missing. I remembered it from the first night I’d stayed with her in her room while she boo-hooed.
Suddenly, it struck me. That is why the man in the bathhouse had looked so familiar. He’d been the man in the picture but aged several years. I hadn’t recognized him right off because he’d been dressed in a white tuxedo in the picture.
Now, I know it seems strange that I wouldn’t recognize my own nephew-in-law except a lot of years had gone by since it was taken. Plus a tuxedo can make an even big difference in a man’s looks. I hadn’t attended the wedding because it was so far away and as far as I could remember, my sister had never sent me a picture of Mira’s husband. The framed photo that had been on Mira’s dressing table was the only time I had laid eyes on the man.
For a minute or two, I pondered why she hadn’t acknowledged him while he was down on his knees, and sobbing in the bathhouse. And then I pondered what the connection was between him and girl in the purple bathing suit. And then
I pondered over how Mira had turned away while he was there. And then I pondered about the fact that Mira had kind of disappeared early-on in the whole bath house experience.
As everything came together in my mind, I got a bad chill down the back of my neck. I didn’t wait. I took off out of that house like a bat out of hell and thanked the Lord Jesus that the policemen hadn’t quite finished settling the computer into the trunk of the patrol car yet when I came barreling out of that house and didn’t stop until I was right beside that squad car.
“You got room for one more?” I said, panting. “I don’t want to wait around for Mira to come home. Not anymore.”
After a few questions, they stuffed me in the back of that police car and took me to headquarters where I felt a whole lot safer than I did sitting there in Mira’s house waiting for her to come back.
Like I said before. The line between deep grief and crazy sometimes gets a little blurry.
Turns out that Mira had managed to hack into her husband’s e-mail account (he’d used the name of his new girlfriend as his password, the big dope) and she’d read the e-mail between them where they were chatting about the girlfriend taking her brother, who was visiting from Japan, to the Hot Springs Bathhouse the next day at ten o’clock. Turns out them Japanese people like their hot water soaks. Mira’s husband said he didn’t want to do the bathhouse, but he would meet her and her brother afterward for lunch at a certain restaurant near there.
Mira hadn’t been trying to be good to me after all. She’d planned to go to that bathhouse all along so she could get a good look at that girlfriend of her husband’s. She’d planned to confront her and ask for her husband back, but Mira told the police later that the minute she got a good look at that skinny little body, she’d just snapped in the head and twisted that skinny little neck real hard without thinking.
Murder At the Buckstaff Bathhouse Page 3