by F. E. Arliss
Lady Zhara was also quite beautiful. Even in middle age a diligent beauty routine and regular visits to an aesthetic dermatologist kept her skin smooth and wrinkle free. Zhara had been ecstatic when they’d found a radio-wave treatment that helped “keep her neck sucked up into her chin” as she described the treatment to Beatriz. Her lack of a sweet tooth also helped keep her weight under control, though she did like a nice piece of cheese and a glass of wine every afternoon. The calories in that little snack probably kept her from being as svelte of form as she wished. Oh well, a little fat in the face kept the wrinkles at bay!
With a headful of mousy, dish-water hair she had colored into a shining mass of glossy chestnut curls, bright blue eyes, creamy skin and a naturally confident posture, Zhara commanded attention wherever she went. She was stunning and looked decades younger than her actual fifty-something years of age.
Yes, Zhara used Botox, E-Matrix, lasers and was on a first name basis with her dermatologist. At home she used a microneedle roller with a ferocity that made Beatriz wince as she watched the dozens of tiny needles in the rounded-roller sink into her lady’s fragile skin. She’d seen Lady Zhara microneedle the backs of her hands, her neck and face, her legs and even her arms. Zhara informed Beatriz as she slathered a special vitamin C serum on afterwards, that all those little holes created collagen and made everything look tighter. Beatriz could attest to the fact that it worked!
Having adamantly refused to wear black in any items other than her accessories, in this case a hat and shoes. Her Ladyship was clad head to toe in shades of burgundy and pink. Nor had Zhara gone casual for this first meeting with the family, having explained to Beatriz many many times, that a good outfit was like a well chosen suit of armor - impenetrable!
In a practical nod to the sweltering humidity and heat of her birthplace, she was wearing a burgundy linen dress cut on the bias so that it swirled around her slim calves in a swaying mass of embroidered waves. Tiny gold threads and seed pearls had been hand-sewn onto the flowing bell-shaped skirt and gave it weight as the dress flowed down the body and flared out with each step.
A pink, loosely knit bolero in a fine, silk thread capped her shoulders as a nod to propriety - not that Lady Zhara actually gave a crap about propriety - but in this case it was done simply to emphasize the difference between her and her cropped-pant-wearing lower-relational forms.
Black sling-back silk pumps adorned her feet, while a tiny fascinator-hat with finger-tip veil sat jauntily atop her head. The hat and veil were simply a shield against the intrusion of her family. Even the finest of lawn-netting, when worn cockily on this little confection of a hat, provided a distance greater than any chain-mail could have. It was a class divider.
Beatriz had shoved a small slouchy, pink-velvet bag into her hands at the last minute. It contained lipstick - the light-saber of all feminine make-up items, cash, and a small atomizer of perfume. The others would have felt awkward wearing anything in this outfit. That was the point. Zhara felt perfectly fabulous wearing every piece of it. That was the intent.
Zhara walked slowly through the parking lot, greeting people jovially as she went. She called out names, hugged people, commented on hair styles and basically portrayed the gracious visitor. Basilio called it her “First Lady” schtick. No one could fault Lady Zhara’s manners. She was always gracious, if a bit distant. Perfectly, perfect.
Except, of course, when she wasn’t - and then, it was perfectly horrifying. The girl could hold her own with the best of them when she was in a rage. Thank Heaven it didn’t happen often,only about once every seven years and in the past had coincided almost completely with the discovery of one of Carlton’s horrific, life-changing lies.
Zhara was loyal and kind, and it took many, many times of having people do her wrong before she finally got angry. However, when she did get angry, it stuck, and was very difficult to undo. Mostly, Beatriz thought it didn’t ever need to be undone, as her Ladyship only ever lost her temper with people who had repeatedly been rude, manipulative or cruel. That was sufficient, as far as Beatriz was concerned, for emotional banishment from Zhara’s life.
Some of the gathering family insisted on calling her Gertrude. Each of her sister’s did it, no doubt trying to put her in her place. That was always the way with her family - they wanted to make sure you knew your place. One of her aunts would never answer any comment anyone made if it involved saying how beautiful Zhara was. It was as though being beautiful, while a fact, was something so bad - so corrupting - that it couldn’t be mentioned.
Zhara thought it was ridiculous and narrow-minded. People had all sorts of gifts. By denying Zhara the one gift her family had allowed her early on - beauty - the aunt was basically denying Zhara any place within the clan.
Her aunt had called her Gertrude and Her Ladyship had corrected her firmly and gently, saying, “Gertrude is long gone. I am Zhara now.” If anyone after that persisted in calling her Gertrude, she simply didn’t answer, pretending not to hear. Finally, in exasperation, the offenders would say, “Zhara!” and then she’d answer slowly, “hummm?” as though just coming to her senses, having been summoned from deep thought by the saying of her true name.
After the rounds of greetings, where Zhara weathered all sorts of jabs about her pink outfit with laughing parries about pedal-pushers, polyester, jeans, and faux pas, the group had quickly learned to shut their traps before Zhara called them out on every nuance of their lower-class trash attire or clueless red-neck behavior.
Only a few were aware of the jabs she’d returned. Some were still wondering what was wrong with polyester - it breathed - the magazines said so. Ok, so sweat was rolling down their spines, Zhara’s dress was wrinkled!!! She looked like she’d never ironed it, ever! Which, of course, Beatriz hadn’t.
One didn’t iron linen if one knew what they were about. Linen was meant to simply be hand-washed and hung dry. If it was rumpled - it was an elegant crush - as it was supposed to be. The better the linen, the less it held a wrinkle. In this heat, Zhara’s dress simply wilted into a fabulously breathable second-skin.
Idiots! Beatriz would snort later. She’d simply sunk into a chair by the door and watched the action unfold. Basilio had stayed with the car, turning up the radio and leaving the air conditioning running as it was easily a million degrees out and humidity could almost be wrung from the air. Not to mention that as soon as he’d slammed the door shut it had cut out the infernal roar of whatever those bugs were that whirred like banshees from the trees. Her Ladyship had called them locusts. He was well aware that locusts were a plague in the Bible!
Lady Zhara told him she liked their sound. He thought it sounded ominous. Very, very ominous. Like how he imagined the piranhas in the Amazon tributaries back home might sound if you could hear underwater before they devoured your feet if you were stupid enough to allow them to dangle in the water from the boat above.
Zhara had politely hugged each of her sisters and complemented some aspect of their appearance. Truthfully, the only one that looked decent was Elizabeth, who had clearly had a face lift. Zhara found this almost comical as Elizabeth had often snorted and condemned Gertrude for vanity when they were younger - being unable, as it were, to compete with Gertrude’s rather stellar beauty. Well, well, Zhara thought - eat those words sister. Once again, Elizabeth was competing. Zhara had not had a face lift and her neck showed it. Points to Elizabeth, should Zhara decide to give a shit about it.
Victoria looked withered and emaciated, though she swore she did not, in fact, have the frontotemporal dementia that the doctors had diagnosed her with. She had come to the family meeting driven by one of their cousins, Paula, who had also undoubtedly been molested by their grandfather. She’d manifested signs of mental instability early on and was known as “eccentric” or sometimes as just plain “crazy” by the extended family. Once she’d showed up to a family funeral with a pair of baby birds in a box and had proceeded to feed them mushed up crickets as the hymns and sermon were gi
ven. Everyone simply accepted that Paula was nuts. End of story.
Lulu Mae was simply haggard. Being around Sue Darla had that effect on people. Lulu’s hair was a frizzled mess of gray, though she’d tried desperately to cover it with some blonde highlights which had dried out the damaged tresses even more. Heavily overweight, she looked like what she was, a worn out, middle aged woman. Even dead Sue Darla was sucking the life out of people. Zhara sighed and felt a moment’s guilt over such a terrible thought about her parent. Then decided that guilt over a true fact was unhealthy and shrugged it off.
Finally, everyone had settled into chairs and looked expectantly at the slightly overweight and profusely sweating funeral director. Something was definitely wrong, Zhara thought. She’d been to a hundred of these small town burials and never had Scott, the overweight mortician, so much as sweated in his polyester JCPenney suit. Now he was mopping his forehead repeatedly and wondering why it didn’t help. Most likely, Zhara thought, internally rolling her eyes, because his handkerchief was also polyester and completely non-absorbent. There was polyester and then there was polyester.
To occupy herself, Zhara cast her gaze over the ancient dusty, silk-flower arrangements and the faded religious prints on the walls. They were still the same even though she hadn’t been here in at least twenty years. So pathetic. The place was the epitome of miserable sad, rural sameness - as she often described it to friends, “Like time in a bottle” nothing changed. As if death wasn’t awful enough, these odes to the unchanging sameness of the rural Midwest heaped a gray faded, depressing atmosphere onto the proceedings.
A few moments later another polyester-clad, rotund man in late middle-age entered. This uniform, while not J.C. Penney issue, was just as ill-fitting, though the epaulettes and star-shaped badge labeled the entrant as a police officer.
“I’m Officer Morant from the city police and I am here to inform the family of Mrs. Darla Sue Dubbins, that her death has been ruled as ‘suspicious’ by our department. It was discovered during her embalmment that Mrs. Dubbins had the remains of a number of Warfarin pills in her stomach. That lead Mr. Gaskins here to call us. We then had the deceased autopsied and the results are clear. Mrs. Darla Sue Dubbins ingested a very large dose of Warfarin that killed her.”
The stunned audience simply looked at Officer Morant and most gasped or covered their mouths in shock. Finally, unable to bear the absence of the question that should have been burning on all of her relative’s tongues, Lady Zhara asked, “She took Warfarin for her heart. And her pills are prepared at the home by the nursing staff. That makes it a little doubtful that she accidentally ingested it herself. So, how did this happen? Was this type different or from a different strain? You’re saying it’s an overdose. How much more than her normal dose?”
“Yes, that is correct,” Officer Morant stated, all brusque efficiency. “The pills are bright pink and that’s why they showed up during the embalmment. They were easily recognizable and since most people only take one at a time, it alerted the undertaker to an anomaly.”
“How much more?” Zhara asked again. “Have they discovered how it was administered? Aside from the type she took for her medication, the only other type of Warfarin commonly available is in rat poison, isn’t it?”
“Yes. How did you know?” Officer Morant turned his beady eyes on Lady Zhara and took a step towards her. This action had Basilio stepping forward as if to intervene. Zhara held up her hand to warn him off and said, “Well, it’s rather hard to get Warfarin. So if it wasn’t her own medication?” She cocked a questioning eye at the corpulent police officer. “Then it has to have been someone else’s medication. It’s the only other way to get it. Isn’t it?” She asked.
“It seems to me you have way too much knowledge about this,” the beet-red policeman said squinty-eyed and accusatory, reacting in the age-old way that all small-town authorities do when their reign of “all-knowingness” is challenged.
“Not really,” Zhara said, eyeing the rotund man mockingly. “It’s on television every night. Or in many a detective novel. It’s all very common-knowledge these days, wouldn’t you agree?”
“No, no I wouldn’t agree,” the sweating officer said. “Perhaps you should come with me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Zhara exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “These are all common questions, based on common knowledge.”
The fat officer trundled towards her and grasped her roughly by one arm.
“Am I under arrest?” Zhara asked laughing, not even trying to stand. Later she would acknowledge that some part of her was deliberately egging the small-minded moron on. She would later refer to him repeatedly as Officer Moron and mean every word of it.
There was nothing like someone who had more than your average local-yokel to inspire outrage in the unfortunate masses of tiny town hearts. It was clear in that musty funeral home salon that Lady Zhara reeked of more.
More, was a common source of jealousy and anger in tiny towns - and her own family, of course. If someone had more money, a bigger car, more athletic children (brains didn’t really seem to count), more land, and on and on, the more envy ensued.
Zhara knew she could prove her innocence, as every minute of her last three days had been observed by others. Her alibi was air-tight, if the narrow-minded idiot had bothered to ask. Instead, her laughter and breezy lack of respect for his authority was causing his tiny-town sense of “special righteousness” to kick into overdrive.
That was the thing with tiny towns, anyone who had any kind of power, simply went berserk if another disrespected them. They disrespected the powerless people under their care left, right and center. Do the same to them and they went all rolly-eyeballed bat-shit nutso.
Within minutes Lady Zhara had been handcuffed - yes, a bit of overkill - if you asked Zhara, and bundled into the police officer’s cruiser. Orders had been given for none of the others to leave the funeral home. Basilio and Beatriz had been given orders by Zhara to “call the damn attorney” and get him here immediately.
When the handcuffs had been tightened so sharply that pain had bloomed in her wrists, Zhara had politely asked for them to be loosened. The beady-eyed sweating behemoth had refused.
That was when it happened, Lady Zhara drew herself upright, pasted a pleasant smile on her face and for the next four hours - exactly how long it would take for her attorney to obtain her release - that smile remained in place no matter what happened.
That smile remained in place when they gave her the ugliest green and grey striped jail-bird outfit she’d ever seen. And when she had to strip in full view of the officers in order to put it on. Enormously too large for her, it had elastic waist pants she had to knot to keep in place and a vee-necked tunic torn under both arms. She noticed the other women wore rather more attractive sets in a solid grey.
The smile remained when Zhara’s need to urinate forced her to use the facilities in full-view of the other occupants of her holding cell and the officers on duty. Zhara hadn’t been born in the wilds of the midwest for nothing. She daintily seated herself on the stainless steel jailhouse throne and let the oversized tunic hide most of her thighs. Zhara wiped herself as though she was polishing the most precious jewel in the crown of the Queen of England. The smile never dropped.
Fury fueled that smile. Lady Zhara’s fury was not to be trifled with.
It stayed in place when they put heavy iron shackles and chains on her so that she could trudge out to talk to her attorney, whose horrified expression at the sight of her in jailhouse dungarees and chains caused the attending deputies to snicker in joy.
That was a big mistake. Lionel Depardue might not be known to these yokels, but he was known to just about any judge, law firm or policing department that monitored nationwide ongoing judiciary news. Lionel was a “big deal” in the lawyering world. His face clouded up and his eyebrows drew together. Lionel did not like being snickered at.
They’d learn soon enough. At first, the deputies had laugh
ed when Zhara had said she had to pose for her attorney in her jail dungarees because they were the ugliest things she’d ever worn. Her ribbing and good humor about the ugly items was exactly the kind of humor the local jail keepers liked. They let Lionel photograph her before she changed.
As soon as Zhara was in the public space of the jail, Lionel frantically snapped pictures of the abrasions and marks on her wrists and ankles caused by the chains and manacles. He didn’t want to lose any time and let the marks fade. The smiles on the faces of the deputies faded quickly as the ramifications of photographic evidence of marks caused while in custody, slowly sunk in. That caused Zhara to have an actual smile. It felt very odd after having pasted the fake one on for hours. Her face hurt. Badly.
The smile only slipped once Zhara was back in the polyester bed-spreaded room at the local Hampton Inn and ensconced in a lavendar oil-infused bath. As soon as Beatriz shut the door to the bath, Zhara cried. And cried. And cried. Nothing had ever been so humiliating or degrading as that afternoon had been.