Tutu Deadly

by Natalie M. Roberts

  “Seriously, Jenn, is he a single returned missionary?” Kim asked again.

  “I have no idea,” I answered. “Dad, please . . .”

  He took the hint, thank God, and I almost forgave him for bringing them here in the first place. I was pretty sure my mother had sent him to make sure I was okay, and Auntie Vi and the cousins had just managed to tag along somehow. My mother had a low tolerance for my father’s family. They must have been visiting, so she had seen an excuse to get rid of them all in one swoop. Great. Lucky for Mom, not so lucky for me. My mother thought Auntie Vi’s obsession with everybody else’s business was crude and vulgar. She thought my father’s brother Jim, who worked as an accountant and served in the bishopric of his ward, was pedestrian and chauvinistic. It was probably best not to ponder what she thought of her daughter the dance teacher. Uncle Jim’s two daughters were just like Auntie Vi. The three used to have sleepovers, where they would play dress up and “Who will be my eternal mate?” while crying over Mormon-themed romances that Auntie Vi would read aloud to them. I only got invited once. After I picked David Lee Roth as my eternal mate, and laughed out loud at the sappy parts of the romances, I was not invited back.

  “Girls, everything is fine here. Let’s leave Jenny be.”

  “Larry, everything is not fine here. Look at your daughter. Just look. She’s past thirty, no sign of a mate or any children, and now she’s gotten herself tangled up in this horrible murder case. Why, I would think you would want to do something about the way her life is going into the toilet, and . . .”

  “Vivian, Jenny says she is fine. You are fine, right, Jenn?” I saw the concern in his eyes, and felt tears pricking at the back of my own. But I was tough, and I was not going to have a meltdown in front of Auntie Vi and my cousins.

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “Okay. You sure you won’t come stay? Your mother is worried sick.”

  It sounded inviting for all of ten seconds, until I remembered my mother’s meaningful sighs and baited questions. Plus I needed to figure out what was going on, and I couldn’t do that if I had to answer questions about every step I made.

  “I’ll be fine.” I wished I could convince myself of that.

  The next morning, I said a little prayer as I pulled my Bug into the tight parking spot on the side of my studio building. “Please God, let today be normal. Please. No dead bodies. No psycho dance moms. No unflattering jail wear.” That was a prayer that, at least partially, would not be answered, for lovely Krystal Glass had scheduled my cookie-dough refund for this morning. God did not like me. I could hear Auntie Vi’s voice in my head: “Sorry, Jenny dear, but God only answers prayers from the worthy.” In her book, that didn’t include me, since I hadn’t embraced Mormonism as God’s true religion. “Hell is a very real place, Jennifer,” intoned Grandma Gilly’s nasal, tight voice. Great. The voices were back. Granted, they were voices I’d been hearing over and over again all my life, saying the same thing over and over again, but still. Voices. Did they have a dress code in mental institutions? I quickly got out of my car and slammed the door shut, hoping the voices would stay behind. I wrapped my scarf tightly around my neck as the bitter cold wind whipped around the corner of the building next to mine and hit me full force.

  The back lot of my building—which had lots of atmosphere and almost no insulation—was closer to the stairway entrance to my upper-floor studio. But I had to leave the back lot for the dance moms, because if they had a hard time finding parking, they would badger me until I pulled all my hair out. Not a good look for a fair-skinned, freckle-faced redhead. That left only a small space on the side of the building, but luckily, my old Bug was small. There’d been a few close calls with cars whipping through the alley, but so far the Bug had survived intact. In a way, I almost wished someone would sideswipe the car so I could get it repainted on their dime, but of course, it didn’t happen. I was stuck with Pepto-Bismol pink.

  I shivered as I climbed the stairway to my studio, and struggled with the lock, cussing as the wind whipped through my thin jacket. The lock finally clicked in and I pushed through the door and then shut it behind me, leaning on it and breathing a sigh of relief, waiting for a modest amount of warmth to flood over me. Nothing. I let out a breath and alarm filled me as I saw a white cloud in front of me.

  “No, no, no, not again. I know I paid that bill.” It was still two days until tuition was due, but I knew I had already sent the gas bill. I hurried into the small office and checked the thermostat setting, which was in the same place I had left it—sixty-three degrees. The thermometer, however, said the inside temperature was a nippy thirty-eight. This was not good. Children did not dance well in freezing temperatures. Hell, some of my students did not ever dance well, but it was certainly made worse by the cold. I pushed the thermostat knob up slightly to sixty-eight, waiting to hear the hiss of the old furnace. Nothing. I pushed it up a little more to seventy-two, waiting to hear something click, or the noisy pipes bang a bit, as they always did when the furnace was firing up, but still nothing.

  Damn. This was bad. See what I got for praying? No wonder I never went to church—any church. I walked to the desk in my office and picked up the cordless phone, hitting the speed dial for the store located directly below me. “Hello, you’ve reached Priceless Pearls. This is Marco. Jack and I are out of the office until December 26, and the store will be closed until that time. If you would like to leave a message . . .”

  “Damn,” I swore as I hung up the phone. Marco and Jack were probably in Mexico again, on one of their countless fishing trips. They went at least four times a year. Maybe I needed to open a pawn-slash-antique shop, and name it using a thinly disguised play on the title of one of the important religious books—The Pearl of Great Price—of the predominant Utah religion.

  If the furnace was out in our building, life would not be good. I couldn’t call the landlord, because Marco was the landlord. He was a great guy, but he usually forgot to tell me when he was going out of town, and I had no emergency contact. Things were dire. I couldn’t call in a furnace repairman, because it was still two days until tuition was due, and I was about to have a ton of cookie dough returned to me that I could not afford to refund the money for.

  I was going to have to call in reinforcements, and I didn’t know anyone who had better fix-it abilities than my dad.

  Of course, calling Dad meant listening to long-suffering sighs and inquiries into when I was going to get my life on track and inferences that I was a huge disappointment to my mother, who had expected several grandchildren by now. During his time teaching school, Dad had followed the “love and logic” method of teaching. Basically, he always asked his students what they thought would be the consequences for their actions, instead of telling them what he was going to do. He liked this method so much, he transferred it into his parental skills. I grew up hearing the words, “And how do you think that’s going to work out for you, Jenny?” The answer, almost always, was “not good.” Almost anytime my dad was around, I could expect to hear a form of this question. Just once I wanted him to say, “You really screwed up this time, Jennifer, and you are grounded for the rest of your life,” instead of making me own up to my behavior in my own words. But he never did say that. He just let me wallow in my own acknowledgment that feeding the neighbor’s four cats from my mother’s finest china—it was a tea party!—would not have good consequences.

  James sashayed through the door of the studio with what looked like a rodent tucked under his arm. He stopped and looked around, a perplexed expression on his perfectly waxed eyebrows. “It is colder than Paris Hilton’s heart in here. I know money is tight, Jenn, but I have to be warm to teach . . .”

  “What is that?” I said, interrupting his self-absorbed patter.

  “Oh this,” he said, practically cooing. “This is Winkie. Isn’t he cute?”

  “Winkie? You have a rat named Winkie, and you think he’s cute?”

  “A rat? Jenny T. Partridge, h
ave you no class and breeding?” James’s voice let me know he was appalled. “Winkie is a miniature Chihuahua. He has papers and everything. A rat! How could you?”

  “He looks like Madison Pratt.” Madison was one of my more unfortunate-featured Tots. It wasn’t her fault she looked like a rodent. She was the spitting image of her father. If her mother had passed down her genes, the child would have resembled a bulldog. These were thoughts I needed to keep to myself. “You brought a dog to my studio, to teach dance? And even more appalling, you brought a dog named Winkie to my studio?” I couldn’t decide which was worse. The rodent under James’s arm, the fact the rodent was considered a dog, the fact the rodent’s name was Winkie, the fact I had no heat and moms with cookie dough would be arriving in fifteen short minutes—moms expecting cookie-dough refunds I did not have the cash to cover—or the fact that James was now glowering at me in a way that meant a temper tantrum was sure to follow. Take your pick. I’d say things couldn’t get much worse, but in my estimation, they always did.

  “Never mind,” I said. I picked up the cordless phone and called my dad. I needed heat in here, and I needed it quick, or things were going to be ugly. I’d have to cancel dance, and then the psycho dance moms would be calling me 24-7, on both my cell phone and my home phone, wanting to know when I was going to make up the lesson that their precious daughter had missed, because God knew one lesson missed was going to guarantee that New York Broadway career went down the tubes.

  “Jenny, are you okay?” James looked genuinely concerned. “You are mumbling under your breath.”

  I ignored him.

  “Dad, I need your help. The furnace isn’t working in the studio, Marco and Jack are fishing, James has a rodent under his arm, and I have dance moms due in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be right there.” I heard some muffled whispering and then my dad uttered the words that chilled my blood another fifteen degrees, putting me dangerously close to hypothermia. “Mom’s coming with me.”

  MY father was a miracle worker, despite the fact he had no real religious inclinations. He went with Nana Marian to church on occasion, mostly to appease her, and had even attended Mass with my mother once or twice, enduring Grandma Gilly’s glares through the entire service. But as a whole, Sunday football and NASCAR was his religion. He’d worked for forty years for the Davis County School District as a junior high school science and math teacher, and was now retired. He didn’t much like kids anymore, especially after years of seeing them at their teenage worst, but he did have mechanical inclinations that had been tightly honed by years of surviving as a homeowner on a tight budget.

  My father could fix anything. Give him a roll of duct tape and he could fix decapitated Barbies, leaking hoses, and probably even perform major surgery. Within ten minutes—minutes through which I’d endured my mother alternately cooing over Winkie the Rat and giving me heartfelt, angst-filled glances—I heard the familiar hiss and clang and warm air started to fill the studio. Just in time for the moms carrying tubs of cookie dough who began to surge through the door. My heart sank. How the heck was I going to get out of this?

  Krystal Glass pushed through, today wearing a light denim jacket with a turquoise cami top underneath it, and another pair of frayed jeans. On her feet she wore stylish black boots. In her arms she carried a ledger book. Behind her trailed Marlys, the look on her round expressive face telling me she would be more than happy to hit Krystal from behind and once she had her on the floor, slap her until Krystal screamed uncle.

  Marlys had less tolerance for psycho moms than even I did. Behind Marlys was Camari Stone, a dance mom with a younger dancer, and apparently today’s flunkie of choice. Krystal usually picked moms she could easily manipulate. Since Camari was a hamburger short of a French fry, she was easy pickings.

  “Well, let’s get this going,” announced Krystal, in a bright, too-happy voice.

  “Jenny and I can handle this,” Marlys said, her voice a low growl. Standing next to Krystal, she looked almost the complete opposite. Her face was bare of makeup, her hair was pulled up into a ponytail, and she wore a sweatshirt over old jeans that had probably come from Wal-Mart. Even so, she was much more beautiful than Krystal, in an understated, earthy way. She was confident, even in her natural state. She just didn’t need the bells and whistles that comprised Krystal Glass.

  “Oh, I’m happy to help,” Krystal replied, giving Marlys a nasty look that usually worked to shut people down and made small children everywhere run in fear. But Marlys had been dealing with pushy psycho dance moms for quite a while now. She knew every trick in the book, and then some.

  The only way Krystal was going to push herself into this situation was over Marlys’s dead body. Urk. I had to stop thinking in clichés.

  “Jenny, can we help?” my mother asked kindly, eyeing the two women warily. I could tell by the look on my father’s face that he was done, and needed to get out of here quick before too many female hormones rubbed off on him and made him cry at Jell-O commercials.

  “No, but thanks, Mom and Dad, thanks so much. I really appreciate you fixing the furnace.”

  “Glad to help,” my father said.

  “Jenny, can you come over to lunch next Sunday?” My mother’s voice was a higher pitch than normal, which meant she was up to something—again. She’d been trying to set me up with nice Catholic boys for the past two months. I think it was because Auntie Vi kept hinting that if I didn’t meet someone and marry soon my ovaries were going to shrivel up and die, and my mother would never get any grandchildren. The problem was, nice Catholic boys who weren’t total dog meat were hard to find in Utah. Here, the majority of people were some form of Mormon—active, jack, or former. Nice Catholic boys grew up and went to Notre Dame and didn’t come back to Utah. The ones who did stick around were nancy momma’s boys. Not my kind of guy.

  “Uh, I’ll have to let you know, Mom.”

  “Please do, dear. I’m making funeral potatoes and prime rib.” Oh, that was a low, low blow on my mother’s part.

  “I’ll let you know, Mom.”

  My parents bid their good-byes, and I turned back to the mess at hand.

  Marlys and Krystal still glared at each other, even as the studio entryway began to fill up with moms carrying tubs of cookie dough. Tubs that I was going to be expected to return money for. Money, that, of course, I did not have. Camari stood expectantly behind Krystal and watched for my reaction.

  I think I’d rather be in a pigpen during slop time than in the middle of a room filled with psycho dance moms who are about to be told they would have to wait to get their money back until I got the money back from the owner of the cookie-dough company. Since I’d already called and spoken with someone in his office that morning, and she had pretty much told me that it would be a cold day in hell before I saw any money from him, I knew that would not be soon. At any rate, I was in possession of some knowledge which I did not intend to share with the psycho dance moms. At least for now.

  “Look,” Krystal finally said, through gritted teeth, “I am here to help. Let’s get this done and over with.” Marlys stood matching her stare, hands on her hips, legs apart.

  “Fine,” Marlys said, through teeth gritted equally tight.

  She turned and clapped her hands, and called the dance moms to attention. “All right, listen up everyone. First of all, you need to form lines one to the left, and one to the right. Mrs. Glass will handle the ones on the right, and I’ll handle the ones on the left.”

  A murmur started in the crowd, and then grew up to a loud roar as they all began asking questions at once.

  “Please, everyone, please, just calm down . . .” I yelled, trying to be heard above the roar.

  “My friend’s daughter ate some dough last night, so they rushed her to the hospital, just in case. Are you going to pay her medical bills?”

  “Are you going to get more cookie dough so that we can raise money to pay for our costumes? I really can’t afford to pay for c
ostumes without a fundraiser to help.”

  “Does poisoning cause a rash, because this really ugly one formed on my . . .”

  A sharp whistle pierced the room, and everyone turned to stare at Amber, who watched the melee from the hallway. She stood for a moment and shook her head disapprovingly, and all the moms kind of bowed their heads as though they were very respectful and sorry that they had not been quieter. How did she do it?

  Alissa got the hot-girl genes, Marlys got the organized genes, Amber got the “I can get your attention and respect the moment I walk into a room” genes, and I got pom-pom hair and carb-addiction genes.

  “I think you all need to listen. Line up. Be prepared to tell us how many cartons you are returning. You should know that you will not be getting refunds until we settle this with the cookie manufacturer, and since there is also an ongoing police investigation, we are unsure how long this might take . . .”

  That did it. The mention of no refunds and long time in her statement set the psychos off and even Amber couldn’t bring them back into control.

  But Detective Tate Wilson could. He strolled through the door, taking his jacket off as he walked, his gun, tucked neatly into a shoulder holster, displayed for all to see. The room grew quiet. I wasn’t sure if it was the gun or the package toting the gun that had these moms silent, but I was thankful for whatever it was.

  “Change of plans, ladies,” Detective Wilson said. “Jenny will be writing each of you a check for the amount of the dough you purchased, and settling with the manufacturer later.” I gasped. Had he lost his mind? I had no money. I had checks, but everybody knew where writing checks when you had no money in the bank got you—jail, that’s where. Jail! Ack! He really did just want to see me behind bars.