Skirting the Grave

by Annette Blair

“Payton’s father used to tell a joke about that: At bedtime Convict Kingston used to ask his deaf wife, ‘Do you wanna sleep, or what?’ and she’d say, ‘What?’ ”

  “Payton’s father’s a chip off the old convict block, isn’t he? He went to prison like his forefather.”

  Isobel covered her mouth with the palm of a hand for a minute. “I never thought of that. Poor Uncle Patrick. On the upside, his being true to the Kingston name might cheer Grand-mère.”

  “You have a weird family.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  God help me.

  “Eventually, the thirty-two men and women started showing up on the mainland to look for husbands and wives of their own—who they mostly married—and all of it led to the mainlanders discovering the beauty of the island.”

  “At least the islanders didn’t inbreed.”

  “I never thought of that. You know, that could account for a few anomalies.”

  I coughed for a bit before I caught my breath. “Whatever happened to the kidnapped ‘bride’ ? ”

  “She died in childbirth.”

  “Yeah, well, the odds were in her favor.”

  “Yep, baby number sixteen killed her. So the handsome convict went to Newport, Rhode Island, and married him a rich young bride, because his island was discovered to be worth a fortune by then, as was he, especially after he sold a few lots to some of the Belleview Avenue mansion set, and the die was cast. Bottom line, his bride made him respectable and gave him sixteen more children. Bride number two outlived him by thirty years.”

  “Lucky her,” I said. “At least she caught a break.”

  “With thirty-two kids to raise? I don’t think so.” Isobel hung a summer set, thin stripes of lime, pink, and turquoise, cut straight on the shorts with the same stripes cut on the bias on the angled top bearing only a single shoulder strap, and a contrasting turquoise slit-front skirt like the one Grace Kelly wore for the car-chase picnic inTo Catch a Thief.

  “Think of the fights wife two had to referee. We Kingstons, we fight all the time. Must be our convict blood.”

  That struck us both funny, and we laughed as if we’d OD’d on tequila shots rather than sugar and caffeine.

  I remembered funerals where family members laughed more than usual, and I recognized it as a coping mechanism, so Isobel’s loquaciousness and hilarity, especially today, didn’t strike me as particularly odd. Besides, Brandy had characterized her as “outgoing,” and that she was. “Pay dirt,” I said. “Skating outfits!”

  “Silly Mad. They’re carhop outfits.”

  “Put the yellow one on to match your skates,” I suggested.

  She pointed to the stash. “There’s the aqua one to match your hat and roller skates.”

  Did I dare try it on? “Oh, you look smashing in yours.”

  I unbuttoned my sailor dress and let it fall to the floor. Then I stepped gingerly out of it, careful not to roll into a split. “So, what does a first selectman do?” I asked, allowing her to release more of her pent-up emotions in any way she pleased, and if that fed my sleuthing instincts, so be it.

  “According to my grandmother, any first selectman—especially my father—walks on water,” Isobel explained while skating beautifully. “But on Kingston’s Vineyard in particular, the first selectman is, foremost, the chairman of the board of selectmen. Historically, he’s like a mayor on a smaller scale, with similar ceremonial duties. On the island, he’s the town manager’s boss, town CEO, and chief administrative officer. He’s also a voting member of the board of selectmen and will often cast the tie-breaking vote for the finance and school boards, among others.”

  “So he runs the show?” I said, ready to slip my arms into the aqua miniskirted, button-front carhop outfit.

  “Actually, he does what his mother tells him to, though it’s really his campaign manager who does the dirty work. They’ve been friends since junior high. Ruben would lie, kill, steal, or die for my dad, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “I heard it from you,” Werner said. “Madeira . . .” He whistled his appreciation. “I’ll never look at pineapple whip the same way again.”

  “Chauvinist.” Twice in one day he sees my yellow bra. I closed the aqua outfit. “Have you been peeping and eavesdropping?”

  He stole the last brownie from the box, took a huge bite, and made a sound that gave me the shivers. “Mm. Hailey’s Pastries?”

  “You’re changing the subject, but yes.”

  “I wasn’t really eavesdropping,” he said, popping the last of my brownie into his mouth. “If you had looked up, you would have seen me come in. Ms. York, I nearly brought your father. Lock the door the next time you have a ‘you didn’t hear that from me’ moment. And you both might want to lock up before you strip, though I don’t mind in the least.”

  “Good advice,” I said. “You owe me a brownie.”

  “I owe you a knot on the head, too, but you don’t see me paying that back.”

  “Oh.” I heard myself from a wobbly distance. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  Seventeen

  The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?

  —KATHARINE HAMNETT

  I think Werner scooped me into his arms, because the next minute he was setting me down in the bathroom. Then I was roller-skating across a field of tarmac, Patti Page singing “The Tennessee Waltz” in the background. I zigzagged past other carhops in aqua outfits, and of course, they were going to and from a parking lot of big-ascot, tail-finned cool cars.

  I couldn’t be Isobel or any of the cousins. None of us had been alive in that era. And why I was the wearer, rather than the casual observer, like on the boat, I didn’t know. Maybe my placement in a vision had as much to do with the owner of the outfit. Single owner; I became that person. Multiple owners; I became an observer. Who knew? Was there such a thing as a guide to psychometric visions?

  At any rate, I was most likely Grand-mère, herself, since these were her clothes, though this didn’t seem like the job for a hotshot matriarch, à la Rose Kennedy.

  The music piped into the lot sounded like a jukebox version of Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.”

  Nick and Werner would love the cars. I read each logo, models familiar to the real carhop of the past but not to Madeira Cutler: Nash, Packard, Studebaker, and a Pontiac Chieftain that could be the forerunner of the hatchback. New car names were Kaiser and Crosley Hotshot; the latter a convertible, two-seater.

  “Yo, Lizzie,” called a girl who stopped in front of me, and whose blouse had Pattie embroidered on it.

  I looked down at my own blouse. Yep. Lizzie. I looked back at the drive-in. A diner quilted in silver and polished to a mirror shine: Rudy’s Red Hots in flashing red and yellow neon up top. Probably famous for hot dogs, not teeny red candies.

  “Got a guy in that salmon and black Chevrolet,” Pattie said, “who wants to see you, specific like.” She popped her bubble gum.

  “Coming right up.” On the way, I gave the guy in the Crosley Hotshot his check for a dollar thirty-two, then I let him count his nickels while I zoomed on over to the black and salmon number. Barf. Ugliest colors I ever saw on a car.

  Mitch Miller belted out an enthusiastic round of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and both of me loved it.

  “Hey, good lookin’,” the driver said, slicking back his DA.

  “What can I do you for?” I asked.

  “The name’s Perry,” said the Jimmy Dean type. “Seven o’clock, Four Square Motel on the pike. Here’s your tip, and I’ll have fries with my catsup.”

  “Sure thing.” I saluted and zoomed away, glanced at my tip and . . . hel-lo—

  I ran smack into a frumpy black Mercury coupe and didn’t know what surprised me more: the bruise on my leg, the ticked nun behind the wheel, or Perry’s tip: a brass motel key wrapped in a
hundred dollar bill.

  Still, I got a wash of Liz’s satisfaction in providing for a young family. Her husband, the bum, spent his time at the Dew Drop Inn or playing the ponies. Never home. Never a paycheck.

  He knew nothing about this money she earned, but she kept her boys fed and invested for the future.

  She was a good mom.

  I couldn’t fault her for her cause.

  Somebody slapped me. I thought it was the nun.

  “Ouch. That hurts. Werner? What are you, some kind of Neanderthal? I never took you for the brutal type.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked, a little pale.

  “I feel a lot better,” I said. “Thought I was gonna be sick. Guess not.”

  “Guess again. Damn straight you were sick. As a dog. That was me holding your hair back and cleaning you up, except that you were out cold.” He ran a shaking hand through his hair while in his other he held a damp washcloth to the back of my neck.

  Isobel rolled into the doorway. “You okay, boss?”

  “I am now. Guess I wasn’t for a while.”

  “If you call humming fifties tunes with your eyes closed and calling Werner, Sister, I guess you weren’t. You were a little bit funny,” she admitted. “What group sang ‘Earth Angel’?”

  “The Penguins,” Werner and I answered together.

  He shook his head, rinsed the cloth, and wiped my brow, my neck, and down toward my cleavage.

  “Hey, my uniform’s unbuttoned.”

  He dropped the cloth and went to work on that. “I’m buttoning it, now that you’re not such an armful. Not my fault you passed out half-dressed.”

  Someone growled, and Werner and I both looked up.

  “Nick? You okay?”

  He growled louder and pointed to the lower half of his face. “Wired shut!” he had already printed on the notebook he pulled from his navy T-shirt pocket.

  “I’m so sorry,” I groaned while Werner finished buttoning my uniform, and that’s when I looked down at his hands and noticed my name tag.

  “Isobel,” I called as I exited the bathroom before the injured men in my life. “What was your grandmother’s name?”

  “Elizabeth, but you can call her Beth, Betsy, Betty, Lizbeth, Eliza, Lizzie. Why?” Isobel continued roller-skating.

  Bette? “I just wondered.” . . . how she would sound through a voice modulator.

  Lizzie? I’d just carhopped in Lizzie’s roller skates. “Isobel, does your grandmother travel in a chauffeured powder blue stretch limo?”

  Isobel stopped dead. “Oh, no. Has she been checking up on me again?”

  “She has if Bette is an alias.”

  “That’s her. Making sure I don’t screw up her plans and shame the family.”

  I shook my head, gave Nick a meaningful look, and smoothed my bodice. “This carhop outfit I’m wearing used to belong to Isobel’s grandmother. I believe she was a carhop in her youth, right, Isobel?”

  “Absolutely, at three different diners, actually.”

  I’d learned from that vision that Grand-mère was self-made, and one man had given her a key wrapped in money. It didn’t seem connected to the first vision at all, but then, most early visions seemed disconnected.

  Understanding lit Nick’s expression. He knew I zoned when I got a reading on a vintage outfit. Werner, however, did not know about my psychic gifts, and he never would.

  Nick had kept my secrets since we were kids, even the weird ones, like psychometry later in life. As for Werner, well, him mocking me by calling me glamazon in third grade, which inspired my “Little Wiener” comment, sort of put him out of the running for secret keeper.

  After Eve, Nick had been my second-main confidant, many times in a romantic way. Now, as a friend.

  Werner was, and always had been, as he put it, my frenemy. As in “keep your frenemies close.” And I was certainly doing that today; yellow lace, front hook, push-up bra close.

  But these days, Werner and I were mostly leaving our polite, if distant, frenemy relationship behind, eerily rising above it toward a “What a messy, seam-ripping clustertuck this is. And give me the pinking shears so I can slit my throat, in a bloody jagged-edged sort of way.”

  I looked at the two men in my life, sizing each other up, and thought, Why me?

  “Miss York,” Werner said, addressing Isobel. “I need to ask you a few questions about your cousin’s death, if you don’t mind.”

  “Should I take off my skates?”

  Werner winced. “As long as you leave your dress on, I don’t care.”

  Nick grunted.

  I made us a pot of tea, just to have something to do. Nice, tummy-soothing chamomile tea.

  Isobel agreed to be questioned by Werner in the empty dressing room area so they could have some privacy.

  “Cupcake?” Dolly Sweet called from the front door. “Are you here?”

  “I have to get the bell back up on that door,” I said to no one in particular. “I can’t take all these surprise customers.”

  The Sweets dropped in every Sunday like clockwork after twelve o’clock Mass. Personally, I think Dolly would have stopped going to church long ago if the shop wasn’t calling her name.

  I knew what she wanted from her visits to Vintage Magic. She wanted, well, magic. She strutted on by me as I went to greet her and Ethel, and she went right to Paris When It Sizzles “to look for a new shawl,” she told her daughter-in-law.

  Ethel had no idea that her wild mother-in-law had never mended her wayward ways and was still having assignations with her old lover, Dante Underhill, ghost. For some reason Dolly, Fiona, and I were the only people who could see Dante, but I could never figure out why the giggles coming from Paris sizzling didn’t make an impression on Ethel, unless Dolly knew Ethel was too deaf to hear.

  Nick winked at me.

  “It kills me that you can’t talk,” I said, “and it’s all my fault. Want me to kiss it better?” After all, I had kissed Werner better. What was wrong with me?

  Nick raised both hands to ward me off.

  “Too mad at me or too sore?”

  He opened both hands, like a mime who’s blameless, then he curled a finger in a come-hither way.

  Werner came out of the dressing room, walked rudely between us—uber symbolic—raised my chin with a curl of his finger, then pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Nick. “That guy’s got a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore carved in your likeness.”

  Werner looked straight at me. “You pack a wallop, kiddo, in so many ways.”

  He went straight out the door, having demonstrated his lack of fear in poking the tiger.

  And from the moment he chucked me under the chin to when I realized I was staring at a closed door, I felt . . . special.

  I turned away and caught Nick’s disapproval.

  “You and I are off again, remember? Friends.”

  Ethel’s head came up. “You and Nick are off? Is that true, Nick?”

  “He can’t talk,” I said. “His mouth’s wired shut. I broke his jaw last night.”

  Eighteen

  And by my grave you’d pray to have me back

  So I could see how well you look in black.

  —MARCO CARSON

  I couldn’t have Nick and Werner both. But since Nick was no longer my boy toy, literally, I wanted them both as friends.

  Was that weird?

  “Sorry, Nick. I guess I shouldn’t have admitted I broke your jaw. Ethel, Nick walked into Fiona’s dark house when I was freaked by threats to my new intern; she was with me. So I attempted to protect her.”

  Nick rolled his eyes.

  “Where is your new intern, cupcake?”

  “Isobel’s in the dressing room, I think. She’ll be out in a minute, and I’ll introduce her to you and Dolly. Nick, I’m not powerful enough to have made a strike to your ego. For the love of Hermès, you’re FBI Special Agent Nick Jaconetti. You fight copperheads in the deadly swamps of . . . wherever copperheads .
. . copper.”

  Nick raised a brow.

  “Well, you don’t see Werner sending me black looks.”

  Ethel giggled. “That’s because the handsome-as-sin Detective Werner’s got his eye on you.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “What didn’t you notice?” Ethel asked. “How handsome he is? Or that he’s carrying a torch for you?”

  “Yeah, that.” I put all my attention into shaping the turquoise ribbon on the tea roses in the yellow Lucite purse with the broken lid on my counter.

  Setting vases of flowers in battered handbags calmed my angst over ill-treated purses and puppy-eyed exes.

  Dolly made her saucy way back up the aisle toward us between vintage nooks, holding Dante’s arm, looking a little weird, I’m sure, to anybody who couldn’t see the hunky ghost. She cackled as only Dolly could, as if she read my mind. “You did too know about Werner’s interest in you, Madeira Cutler. Everybody in town knows.”

  “Fuzzy pink elephant slippers! Tell me it isn’t so. Wait. I’ll bet my father doesn’t know.”

  “He’d be the only one,” Dolly said, “but that would be typical of him, since he doesn’t know he loves poor Fiona.”

  Isobel came out of the dressing room sometime after Werner left and skated her slow way to the counter, her eyes puffy.

  I pretended not to notice, so as not to embarrass her, as I introduced her to the Sweets.

  Seeing Nick seemed to cheer her up.

  Really? Just because I didn’t want him didn’t mean I wanted anybody else to have him.

  “Sorry your jaw’s broken,” she said, shaking his hand. “If it’s any consolation, you look a lot better now than you did last night and this morning.”

  The Sweets’ radar went up so fast, multiple antennae about poked me in the eye.

  Isobel had been gathering her emotions together after talking to Werner, but she might also have been listening to us and learning the lay of the land. Meanwhile, the Sweets thought she spent the night with Nick.

  To correct or not correct . . .