by F. E. Arliss
“We will keep our ears open. Won’t we Basilico?” Beatriz said adamantly, patting Zhara’s hand. “You’ll figure it out.”
When they entered the community center at Sue Darla’s assisted living facility, it was exactly the way Zhara remembered. Large, empty and decorated with the ubiquitous, bargain-warehouse wall art and overstuffed furniture that, though new, looked like it had been ordered in the last century.
It was all very farm country classic. Most East Coast decorators wouldn’t even know what that was. Zhara could assure them it was a real thing. Usually involving a lot of bad taste, camouflage and brown chenille.
It was also practical. Brown chenille didn’t show dirt. In farm country, there was a lot of dirt. It was why people had dirt-colored carpet, dirt-colored clothes, dirt-colored cars and dirt-colored furniture. It was basically, dirt camouflage. Actual camouflage, the type used for hunting, was also extremely popular. Sometimes even as upholstery fabric!
As people began to trickle in, Zhara started cataloging suspects in her mind. While she should have been talking genially to her relatives, including a sister and the jealous aunt, she instead, greeted them cordially and then wandered about greeting people who arrived. Seriously, someone had to do it. The rest of the family acted as though their manners had flown out the window. Plus, it allowed Zhara to listen to people and take stock of their stories about Sue Darla.
She must have told the “arrest story” a hundred times. By the time the get-together was over and the catered cheese tray from the local grocery store had been scraped down to the waxed-paper serving tray - food never went to waste in the midwest, no matter how awful it was, or how hard around the edges the cheese got - Zhara had a picture of who some of the suspects might be.
First, there was her sister, Lulu Mae, who might have simply gotten sick and tired of taking care of their ever demanding and singularly self-interested, malignant-narcissist mother. For that matter, Victoria and Elizabeth weren’t completely out of the running just because they didn’t live nearby.
Victoria had been remarkably quiet during the get together. Usually she was busy trying to manipulate people or push their buttons to, in some way, get a rise out of them. Paula, the cousin she’d chosen to live with, was either a very good influence, or a very bad influence. Zhara wasn’t sure which. She did feel slightly sad that Victoria seemed so beaten down and lifeless. In the past, Victoria had always been able to put people on their ears. Now she just sat blankly. Looking around, but never engaging with those near her. Maybe it was the illness, maybe it was Paula’s influence.
People simply didn’t understand how crazy Sue Darla was, or how selective her narcissism made her memory. When Sue Darla had wanted to sell her home in a nearby small town in order to raise funds to move into the Samaritan Village, Gertrude and Carlton had offered her a very fair price for it in order to help out. They’d thought they could use it for a place to rusticate when an especially rough overseas post called for someplace to rest on home leave.
Sue Darla had instantly turned down the offer to buy the house. She told anyone who would listen that they were trying to cheat her, even though the offer was generous in the extreme. Sue Darla’s inflated opinion of all she had would never let her have a realistic view of her belongings. When Sue Darla sold the home several years later at auction, it sold for a third of the money they’d offered her.
Conveniently, and most likely because she was a lunatic, Sue Darla didn’t ever remember that they’d offered her three times the amount. She did, however, complain endlessly about what it sold for. After all, her things should be extraordinarily valuable. Clearly, the fact that auction sales were usually things that were ‘unsaleable’ on the open market, had clearly passed her by.
The second suspect was a young woman who Sue Darla had seemed to confide quite a bit in. The trashily-dressed bimbo named Brittany Barlow apparently had done her mother’s nails for a number of years. She was practically oozing joy at the visitation because, as she’d told anyone who would listen, “Miss Sue Darla remembered me in her will! Isn’t that just the sweetest!”
Their friendship had broken up last year and Sue Darla went to a new nail girl. No one seemed to know why they’d parted company, but in the end it didn’t matter, as Sue Darla hadn’t had time to change the will. So Brittany was still in the will and on the list of suspects.
One of Sue Darla’s friends, a cagey older woman who took Sue Darla’s faults in stride, had muttered to Zhara as she’d hugged her and chatted, “Sue Darla was getting to the place where her costs of living and medications weren’t going to be covered by her retirement income. Brenda’s probably happy to see her go!” Brenda Roberts was the administrator of the facility and was cordial and hardworking as far as Zhara knew.
As motives went, it seemed a bit of a stretch - killing off one’s clientele in order to keep the home’s profits in the black seemed a bit extreme. On the other hand, it was a motive. Not much of one, but still, a motive.
Sue Darla could have lived in a different assisted living home and had plenty of money to keep herself until her death. But, she’d had to live at Samaritan Village. To keep her image in the community she needed to be in the most prestigious facility. Zhara could still hear her saying in absolute bliss at the end of the first week she’d lived there, “I’m just the happiest I’ve ever been. People wait on me. They clean my apartment. They do my laundry. They cook me three meals a day and it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m finally getting what I deserve.”
Most people had a hard adjustment to living in a home. To Sue Darla, this had simply been a move to the best life had to offer - people waiting on her. Zhara could actually understand that. She liked a good staff too. What she wouldn’t like was leaving her home. Her mother hadn’t seemed to even register that except to complain about the sales price. Plus, as far as Zhara could tell, her mother only got what she deserved when someone knocked her off with an overdose of Warfarin.
One of the nurses had given her sympathies to Zhara and said, “Well, she was a firecracker till the end. Still fighting with Betty Jean Franklin over old Sawyer Lowell. Gave Betty a run for her money she did.”
The nurse, of course, thought Zhara would find this admirable. When in fact, Zhara knew Sawyer Lowell and was aware that never had their lived a more loathsome man. That anyone would fight over the hugely ego-inflated nitwit was beyond comprehension. Unless, of course, one knew her mother, brainless sex maniac, that she was.
That gave them at least four suspects. Zhara supposed she ought to set out to talk to each of them and see what they had to say.
Chapter Twelve
Lulu Mae
Lulu Mae was clearly worn out with caring for the ever demanding Sue Darla. Her hair was graying, her nails ragged and her complexion a mass of wrinkles and age spots. When Zhara had gone to see her at her home to check on how she was doing, Lulu Mae had invited her in, plunked a Coke on the table and said, “Don’t ask me to be sad. I almost hated her by the end.”
“Don’t worry. I understand completely,” Zhara had assured her exhausted sister. “She did have a way of sucking the life out of people.” Her sister only nodded.
Zhara herself had often in the early years of her marriage tried to help her mother. She supposed she’d felt a bit guilty with how much Carlton had come to dislike Sue Darla and had refused to have even the most distant of relationships with his mother-in-law. So, she’d worked on her mother’s decrepit apartment building and had at one point, even offered to buy her mother’s house in order to raise funds for her care at the home.
Even though the renovated apartment building Zhara had worked on for almost an entire year sold for an astronomically high price for the area, Sue Darla never did say thank you to Zhara or praise her efforts. She just took it all for granted - then complained that Zhara hadn’t prepaid the taxes or made enough on the sale. Her mother’s tax accountant had told her not to pay the taxes, so not Zhara’s problem. But that was the than
ks you got from this family - a knife in the back. So their style!
That was probably when Zhara decided she didn’t even need to feel guilty about not liking her psycho mother. The woman was, unmitigatedly, awful. She couldn’t really blame her sister for being on the suspect list. If she still lived here she’d be on the suspect list too. Poor Lulu Mae was most likely completely drained by her vacuous mother and any life she might have had probably lay in tatters around her feet.
She simply hugged her sister gently and said, “No need to explain. I know exactly how you feel. Now, tell me who you think did it!”
Lulu Mae laughed, slid into a chair at the table and said with the first signs of life since Zhara had seen her, “Who didn’t want to!” They both laughed.
“Well, I hear Betty Jean Franklin was warring with her over Sawyer Lowell, horrid toad,” Zhara said, rolling her eyes. “Is your money on her?”
Lulu Mae didn’t laugh. “Believe it or not, the fighting over Sawyer did get pretty heated. Mom used to yell, “Twit!” at Betty any time she saw her. It was so embarrassing. Once at the annual ice cream social we were sitting next to Betty Jean’s daughter, but mom didn’t know who they were and said, “Oh, there’s that slut! Twit!” really loud right in front of them. I could have just died right on the spot,” Lulu Mae said, shaking her head.
“OMG! That sounds awful,” Zhara sympathized. “I’d have just gotten up and left.”
“Well you did, didn’t you?” Lulu Mae suddenly snapped waspishly at her.
“Yes, I did!” Zhara said with a laugh, then added gently, “You could have too. No one was ordering you to stay here but your own guilt and worry that other people would think you were a “bad” daughter.”
“You are a bad daughter!” Lulu Mae said angrily. “You should hear what they say about you!” She added with a slightly twisted grin.
Zhara nodded and shrugged her shoulders, “I can imagine. I can tell you that at least two of my high school classmates also have horrible mothers, yet they stay here and pretend to be good little daughters. The fear of other’s thinking your a “bad” daughter, is deeply ingrained here.”
Lulu Mae said nothing.
“I just got done watching this fabulous French television series called, “Murder In…”, Zhara murmured to her sister. “Each week it’s about some different area of France and showcases how beautiful the country is.”
“While I liked that aspect of it, the best part was that the series never once - not in four seasons of nine episodes each - ever portrayed a functional family. They were always angst ridden, twisted, angry and jealous. It was so much more realistic than how we’re taught to believe families should be. I really took a lot of comfort from it. It validated what I already knew, families are full of all the things we’ve been trained to overlook - real human emotions - most of them not nice.”
“I’ll watch it if you leave me the information,” Lulu Mae said with a sad smile. “It sounds like just what I need. Though I suppose most people will think it’s bad that I’m watching a show about murder when our mother has just been killed.”
“Who’s to know?” Zhara answered, patting her sisters hand, sad that even now, after escaping the drudgery of their mother’s strangle-hold, Lulu was still worried about what everyone else would think. “Don’t tell them,” she encouraged gently. “Do what you want. It’s no one else’s business.”
Chapter Thirteen
Brittany Barlow
As the second suspect, her mother’s empty-headed, thirty-six year-old manicurist, seemed to have the least motive. “I mean, who kills anyone for twenty-thousand dollars?” Zhara had asked Beatriz, rolling her eyes.
Beatriz had promptly informed her Ladyship that, “Anyone in my neighborhood back home would kill easily for that kind of money.” That information had Zhara re-evaluating her idea of motive.
Every three weeks like clockwork, Sue Darla had driven to another small town nearby and had lunch with Brittany Barlow, then Brittany did Sue Darla’s nails. Usually in a shade far too bright and far too glittery for a mature woman of eighty-five.
Brittany Barlow had a much younger boyfriend. He was a good fifteen years younger than her and she kept him by her side with a ludicrously unsustainable mix of manipulation, overt sexuality, bizarrely far-fetched stories of other men waiting in the wings, and a wide selection of kinky sex toys. Anyone with any brain knew that this wouldn’t last long.
Though, admittedly, men in that neck of the woods were incredibly easily led by their dicks. So maybe it would.
Sue Darla thought Brittany was wonderful and her good true friend. She had made a provision for Brittany in her will, of in her mind, a whoppingly-enormous sum of twenty-thousand dollars. It did the trick. It kept Brittany doing Sue Darla’s nails and catering to Sue Darla’s massive ego for five years.
To Zhara, twenty-thousand dollars was two month’s wages for her household staff. To Sue Darla and Brittany, that was a huge sum of money.
In Zhara’s mind, the friendship was almost unfathomably weird. An eighty-five year old woman and a thirty-five year old woman got together and talked about sex and the men they were screwing over a nail session. It gave her the shivers in its absolute perverseness.
But, what the hell, Sue Darla wasn’t just any old woman. She was an inanely immature, vapidly man-chasing machine, who thought of nothing but sex and romance. One only lead to the other in Sue Darla’s mind, so they might as well just be lumped under the basic category of sex, period.
Even at the ripe age of eighty-five Sue Darla had been taking a progesterone supplement to augment her sex life. Zhara didn’t want to even bother with how she knew this - it had all been TMI!
When Zhara drove over to the next town and popped in on Brittany to “have her nails done for the funeral”, she got an earful from the the ever chatty and sillily-transparent nail technician.
“Oh, are you going to be coming back here to settle?” Brittany had asked, her eyes gleaming with avarice. Her face fell when Zhara had answered in the negative. “Oh, well that’s too bad. Your mom and I really got along great!”
“I thought mom stopped coming over for her nails?” Zhara said, baldly confrontational now.
“Well, not really,” Brittany said whiningly. “She just got so she didn’t want to make the drive. She was getting old you know?” She snapped at Zhara.
“Yes, of course,” Zhara had soothed the situation with an affirmative nod and settled in to get her manicure refreshed. What followed was the longest, most excruciatingly long hour ever!
Zhara, an expert at charming loathsome foreign diplomats, smiled, laughed and cajoled the young woman into revealing all her secrets. They came out after the first ten minutes and a few dirty jokes.
Zhara had forgotten she even knew any dirty jokes. Thank Heaven for her horrid Uncle Jeff, all he did was tell dirty jokes. Seriously, no wonder her aunt was such a nasty piece of work. Anyone married to Uncle Jeff for more than a few months would have a brain turned to mush by his inane banter.
Uncle Jeff could not communicate normally. All he could do was tell joke after tasteless joke. Well, that wasn’t entirely fair. Uncle Jeff could also talk about guns, deliver a racist dialogue that would shock even the most virulent bigot and frequently ask the most distinguished of guests whether they needed his “penis stimulator” pills.
But there it was, the desire to have a man, no matter what. Her mother had often complained about how her sister had it so much better having been married to Jeff. Zhara who found her aunt almost intolerably inane, simply because Uncle Jeff was possibly the stupidest, most loathsome moron Zhara had ever met, could never stomach that complaint. Each time she would retort with the same reply. “Be glad you didn’t marry Jeff, mother, or your brain would have turned to mush just like your sister’s.” Not, frankly, that Sue Darla’s brain wasn’t mush already, because it so totally was.
“Well, you know,” Brittany stated petulantly as she was applying the top coat
on Zhara’s dark coral nails, “Sue Darla told me I’d never be able to keep Kevin,” naming her much younger love interest. “She said I was too old for him and that he’d leave me for a younger woman! She was so mean.”
“I told her that she was trying to get Sawyer Lowell and he was ten years younger than her, so why couldn’t I keep Kevin? Not to mention that she’s got all that problem with her hemorrhoids and he’s not gonna’ want to deal with that! I just told her!” The younger woman ranted on, completely unaware that these kinds of topics weren’t really what normal people talked about over a manicure. “She said he had them too, so it wouldn’t matter. I said it would!”
Zhara had merely “hummmmed” at the woman and the flow of weirdity continued. “She’d give me a hundred dollar tip sometimes and that day she just got up and walked out. The old bag! I was just sayin’ the truth of it!” Brittany shrieked, jamming the top on the bottle of nail polish and slamming it down on the nearby counter. “I’m glad she passed before she had a chance to change her will. She told me she was going to change it. Just being so mean and spiteful,” the woman said mournfully to Zhara.