Wedding Bell Blues

by Ruth Moose

  “Thought you were tied up with building booths at the fairgrounds for the Green Bean festival,” I said to Scott, ignoring his comment and hoping to move on to address the work he’d promised to do at the Dixie Dew. He seemed to suddenly have a lot of jobs in places other than the Dixie Dew, and I desperately wanted a gazebo built in the backyard in time for Ossie and Juanita’s wedding, which was less than a week away. Ossie was an outsider and not one of my favorite people in the world, not even close. But Juanita was one of us, and in Littleboro, we make big allowances for our own.

  I’d seen gazebo doodles Scott had made on paper napkins, but nothing actually taking shape in my long-neglected backyard. You couldn’t call it a garden now. I yearned for the days when Mama Alice had iris that bloomed so big and tall they fell over in glorious purple-and-white fainting blossoms. Even those iris had long ago died out. Iris are hardy for years, generations even, but not these. Not in my “garden.” This spring I’d had some azalea blooms, half attempts that afterwards hung like dirty rags on the bushes. Awful, awful and I didn’t have time nor money to make the yard picture-perfect beautiful. A fresh, sparkling-white gazebo would be a centerpiece. Maybe the rest wouldn’t get noticed so much.

  “I was just passing by when my cell phone nearly jumped off my truck seat,” Scott said. “Somebody”—he paused and glanced over at Ida Plum—“seemed to be having an emergency.”

  “Upstairs bath,” Ida Plum said. “That leak under the sink. You don’t have it fixed.” She turned her attention to me. “Gonna rot that floor out and the tub and all the bathroom stuff will come down through the ceiling onto our heads.” She put one hand atop her head as if the falling of porcelain seemed imminent.

  “It’s not that bad,” Scott said. “But I think you better call an RP.”

  “What’s an RP?”

  “Real plumber.” He tapped the end of my nose with his forefinger. “Don’t wait too much longer. Leaks don’t fix themselves.” He headed out the door, but looked back, said, “And keep that funny little freckled nose out of Ossie’s business.”

  I heard Scott laughing as he went down the back steps and I knew he was probably right about Ossie wanting to haul me in with Reba. And that I ought to call a real plumber. Real plumbers meant big bucks, of which I had scant. Sometimes I thought this house was held together only with wallpaper paste and paint, plus the McKenzie good name. At least it had a sparkling new roof and gutters. I love roofs and gutters and the feeling of both being new and solid over my head. I’d like them even better if they were paid in full. But I was getting there, month by month.

  Ida Plum took off her apron, one of Mama Alice’s aprons that was so old, so washed and worn, the pattern had faded to an all-over gray. I bet it was one Mama Alice had made of feed sacks. She used to get those at the Feed and Seed, said there was nothing like good, solid cotton and you couldn’t buy better dish towels and aprons than those made from the sacks.

  Ida Plum put the apron on the back of a chair at the kitchen table and said, “Sit. I want to hear all the gory details.”

  I sat, but wasn’t about to go into the details. I was trying too hard to get them out of my head, the taste of that CPR stuff out of my memory. It wasn’t easy.

  “A cup of tea is what I need.” I started to get up.

  “Sit, sit,” she said again. “I don’t want you messing up my kitchen.”

  She got up and flipped the switch on the electric kettle.

  “Your kitchen?” I started to argue. That little jab went right to the quick. I was guilty of getting myself involved in situations that took my time and attention off running the Dixie Dew, not to mention my flagging little tearoom, The Pink Pineapple.

  “Seems I spend more time in it lately than you do,” Ida Plum said. “Running this business would go to nothing if somebody around here didn’t mind it.” She got china cups from the dining room, not the usual coffee mugs from the kitchen. Cups meant a special occasion. Serious talk. Truth maybe. Lingering. No sip, swallow and run, as I tended to do with coffee.

  “I checked in your guests and gave them beautiful explanations about how their lovely hostess and innkeeper had momentarily—and I emphasized the momentarily—stepped out for an errand or two and would be back soon to greet them warmly.” Ida Plum set a cup and saucer in front of me. “I did not tell them you had gone to rescue a crazy person who had killed somebody and was arrested and then gone poking around a motel where you didn’t belong, not to mention with a preacher in tow.”

  “Whew,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I told her about finding the motel key and Pastor Pittman surprising me while I was looking around the motel room. I told Ida Plum I thought Reba might be in more of a mess than I originally suspected when I went flying out after she called. I didn’t have it all sorted out. I wasn’t ready for a scolding—or the truth.

  I was in trouble, Crazy Reba trouble. An angry woman on the phone had threatened my life. What had been wedding plans (of a sort) had gone astray in the worst possible way. Murder? Things were not adding up. Whoever Reba said she killed was not the man in the driver’s license picture. No way. But was the man on the picnic table her “intended”? All she’d ever said was she was marrying God and we had smiled and nodded, said to ourselves, Sure you are, honey. Sure you are. We’d played along. Such imagination. Reba was one of a kind, but she was our own. Rethinking all this now, I knew for certain the men’s clothes hanging in the motel closet didn’t look one bit to me like they fit that scrawny, plucked chicken of a body I’d done CPR on. The taste of his nonexistent oral hygiene was still in my mouth. Yug.

  The Pilot, the newspaper of the Sandhills in North Carolina, was published in nearby Southern Pines. I subscribed to it by mail, but I suddenly remembered it was online. They were up-to-date, upscale, mod. I usually waited to read the hard copy when it came by mail, but sometimes, just for kicks, I’d scan the online version. I knew The Littleboro Messenger (locals called it The Mess) would never go online. It was too far back in the dark ages. Sometimes I even imagined them scribbling away on parchment using quills.

  At the computer in my pantry/office, I searched to see if there was anything about a mystery man, a body rescued from a picnic table beside the Interstate near Littleboro.

  There was: a tiny item at the bottom on the first page. No photo, thank goodness, just a description of the man, scraggly red beard and all, except it didn’t say scraggly, just gave his height and weight and that he was in “critical condition” and next of kin was being sought.

  Then another thought hit me. If this mystery guy was still alive, where was God? aka Butch Rigsbee? Maybe Reba had really killed him. If so, where was the body?

  I yelled for Ida Plum to come read over my shoulder to see if she saw what I was seeing. He was alive. We read together that Ossie DelGardo was asking for anyone with a missing family member or with further information to contact him in Littleboro.

  Well, I would certainly do that. Right away. I didn’t have much information, but maybe just enough to get Reba off the hook right now.

  “Keep the kettle on,” I called to Ida Plum as I went out the door. “I’ll be right back. Or … if I’m not back by lunchtime, call anybody who can get me out of Ossie DelGardo’s stainless-steel clutches.” I shook my shoulders at the very thought of being grabbed, arrested or held by the likes of Ossie.

  Chapter Six

  I was upset, relieved in a way, that the mystery fellow was still alive, so I metaphorically pulled up my big girl panties and marched downtown to the Littleboro police station. I stormed straight past Wanda Purncell at the reception desk and into Ossie DelGardo’s office.

  Ossie swung his legs off his desk and his boots hit the floor with a blam, kerthump. He even wore his big white cowboy hat in this office! Bad, bad, Mama Alice would have said. You take off your hat when you come in the house. That was manners. Where had the man been raised? Now he leaned over and with the blade of his hand wiped any boot prints off his desktop
. He raised a finger like he was signaling me to give him a minute. What I planned to give him was a piece of my mind.

  “I’m not Reba,” I almost shouted. That was not what I meant to say but it was the first thing that came out. What I meant was that I had not been messing around with Butch Rigsbee and had no idea why Reba had said she killed the “better man.” Only in Reba’s eyes and mind could anyone refer to that scrawny man on the picnic table as better.

  “Whoever said you were?” He laughed and rolled his eyes, then smirked a smile at the corners of his mouth as though sometimes he’d gotten the two of us confused and weren’t we somehow, somewhere a bit related? Two crazies in the same town. Too much.

  “And I’m being threatened.”

  “Calm down, missy,” he said, coming around from behind his desk.

  I hated being called “missy” and double hated it when Ossie DelGardo did it. So I stood there and steamed. I felt heat rising off me.

  “Suppose you take this comfy little chair right here and tell me all about it.”

  He pulled out a straight chair and patted the back of it. Not for a minute was I going to sit down in his office. I was going to say my piece and high step it out of there.

  “The man Reba has been seeing. The one she called God, who she said she killed. He does not look like the photo in the wallet, and his wife is threatening me.”

  “Whoa.” Ossie held up his hand like a stop sign; all he needed was a whistle. “Hold on. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Reba. You got Reba in jail for a crime she didn’t commit and some crazy woman is threatening me and nobody knows where her husband is. Butch Rigsbee, the driver of the ‘God’ truck. He could be murdered for all we know.”

  “And how do you know all this?” He stood toe-to-toe with me, his big cowboy boots touching my scruffy size seven sneakers. One move and he could crush all my toes to bitty bones and jelly.

  I stepped back. I would have to confess I had the wallet. I’d trapped myself.

  “I just know,” I stammered. “I was in the motel room where Reba had been with him.”

  “Him who?”

  “The man she thought she killed.”

  Ossie started laughing. “Of all the tales I’ve heard about you since I’ve been in this town, you tell the wildest. Was this a threesome?” Now he laughed louder.

  “I have the wallet.” I felt like stamping my foot. He didn’t believe a word I said.

  “What wallet? Whose wallet?” He laughed more, slapped his sides laughing. “Now you’re into stealing? Well, missy, you bring me that wallet and we’ll take it from there.”

  He turned back to his desk, opened the drawer and picked up a pen, clicked it on and off. Ignored me. He closed his desk drawer but not before I saw a scrunch of red satin and lace. A thong? Juanita’s? Then I noticed three framed photos of the engaged Juanita lined up on the windowsill. Big photos with gold filigree frames. No wonder he wasn’t interested in any crime or criminals in Littleboro. One of the huge photos showed Juanita sprawled on her back, legs outstretched, arms wide open in a come-here-you-big-hunky-man sort of pose. She reclined in her red heart-shaped bed. The other photo was a close-up of Juanita hugging a white Pekingese dog. The third photo was Juanita, a much younger Juanita in a bathing suit at the beach. A pinup pose if I ever saw one.

  “Meanwhile,” I said my hand on the doorknob, “you let Reba go this minute.”

  “Miss Reba is fine where she is. In fact, I heard her over there singing her heart out.”

  I stomped out so fast I stirred a hot breeze as I whooshed past Wanda Purncell’s desk. I knocked off a vase that had a big, fat red rose in it and didn’t stop to pick it up or apologize. Wanda just said, “Oh,” and put her hands to her face. I kept going.

  Chapter Seven

  When I got outside I heard Reba’s clear, fresh voice singing “Amazing Grace.” The jail was in the basement of the courthouse across the street. I thought yes, how sweet the sound of Reba singing. I expected to hear her crying. It wasn’t all that many hours ago she was crying and crying hysterically.

  I entered through the basement door and demanded to see Reba. The skinny deputy at the desk, who didn’t look a day older than eighteen, didn’t even ask for my ID. It was Danny, the bag boy from M.&G.’s, in a police uniform. Must have been his first day on the job because I’d seen him bagging groceries just last week. Maybe he’d been hired on temporarily to keep an eye on the prisoner now that there was one. The last prisoner had been Miss Tempie’s handyman. That was over a year ago and they’d transferred him fast to the Wake County jail where they had full-time guards and windows that didn’t open.

  “Sure thing, Miss Beth,” he said. “Keep her quiet for a while, don’t think I can stand much more of that singing.”

  I looked through the bars and there she sat on the edge of her jailhouse bunk making a cat’s cradle.

  “Look,” Reba said, holding up the dirty strings she must have pulled from her jail blanket and had woven around the fingers of both hands. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  I swallowed. “Beautiful,” I said. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “Beans.” She grinned. “Some green beans from KFC. Extra crispy.”

  “Oh, Reba,” I said, “Ossie’s bringing you supper and I think you already had enough beans for today.”

  “Not me.” She dropped her cat’s cradle and came to the bars, held on to them just like you see in movies.

  “The better man. But he wasn’t,” she whispered. Then she lifted her head toward the ceiling and started singing, “Itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout…” while making the climbing motions with her fingers.

  I’d bring her some towels, a washcloth and shampoo next time I came. I squeezed her fingers, noticed her nails were in better shape than my own and waved goodbye. Somebody at Juanita’s had evidently done a gratis manicure for the June bride. The bride who wasn’t to be. She didn’t seem upset at all.

  I bet Ossie wasn’t buying any of this as anything but typical Littleboro craziness. Just some unfortunate somebody lying on a picnic table out by the Interstate. And an abandoned room at Motel 3 that he’d asked Bruce, who handed the job off to Allison, to tape off as a crime scene until he got around to investigating it. Let Reba cool it off in jail. A confession from her wasn’t worth a hill of beans, as Mama Alice would say.

  I was the only one upset. I was the only one in danger. Unless it was Butch Rigsbee. And where the hell was he? Rigsbee’s wife must have seen me go into the room at Motel 3, asked Allison my name and so forth. Maybe she had waited for me at the Dixie Dew with some awful plan in mind. Kidnapping? Taking me out somewhere in the boondocks and doing me in? And why wasn’t she trying to find her husband? I was only in this thing because Reba got me involved. And I was in it up to my neck.

  Chapter Eight

  The wallet was the ticket to all this confusion.

  I stormed back to the Dixie Dew. On Lady Bug’s front seat, I riffled through the bundle I had planned to take Reba but forgot, I was so intent on confronting Ossie. Maybe it was better that I had forgotten. She didn’t need her bridal dress and flip-flops and even seeing them would only remind her of God and the better man and Ossie hauling her in and that would start her crying again.

  The wallet wasn’t there. I unrolled Reba’s dress, laid the flip-flops on the seat, shook out the dress and no wallet. Well, dammit. I knew I had put the thing in there when I left the motel room to go sit in Pastor Pittman’s car but it wasn’t there. I felt around on the seat, under the seat. Nothing. No wallet.

  Mama Alice used to say I would lose my head if it wasn’t fastened onto me.

  I folded everything back together, laid it on the seat and got out.

  Maybe the wallet had fallen out in the Motel 3 parking lot, never even made it to my car.

  Ten minutes later Lady Bug and I pulled in the empty parking lot at Motel 3, a depressing sight if there ever was one. What had once been ten units
that stayed freshly painted and respectable as a mom-and-pop motel could be, now had only two rooms ready to rent. Since the Motel 3 franchise had bought it last year and torn down a good portion of it, the remaining buildings stood surrounded by scaffolding and construction waste. Even in daylight it looked like the set for some down-and-out drama production, a dark murder mystery. The piles of rubble pushed behind the buildings provided a perfect backdrop of chaos. A big yellow bulldozer sat atop the rubble.

  I looked around the parking lot, which was littered with cigarette butts, checked very carefully the area where Pastor Pittman’s car had been parked, and then around the door of the room where Reba and her “intended” had their tête-à-tête, their last supper. Yellow crime scene tape still blocked it off.

  I rang the doorbell outside the end unit marked OFFICE. Background sounds of Dr. Phil’s TV pop-psychology advice show drifted out. “And just when was the last time you had contact with your last lover?” I heard him ask amid the wailing sobs of a woman. The door unlocked and Allison stuck out a hand holding a lit cigar. One of those smaller, more dainty ones aimed at women smokers.

  “Beth?” She opened the door wider. “What are you doing back here?” She motioned for me to come in. Before I could answer, she clicked off Dr. Phil from the oversized flat-screen TV, then went behind the desk and picked up her coffee cup. “I only got one room available now. Looks like Ossie is trying to put me out of business.”

  Allison and her best friend Andrea had been the Littleboro High School bad, bad girls. Rumor was that the two of them had written their phone numbers on all the men’s restroom walls all over town. I wondered if the numbers had faded or the two kept the paint fresh and kept Motel 3 in business. If so, it sure didn’t look from the outside that business was booming.