by Anne George
“I’ll think about it.” I knew I wouldn’t. If Haley wanted to visit Tom one last time as his wife, that was her business. I changed the subject. “Sunshine was here at three o’clock this morning.”
“You’re kidding. Where is she now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, what did she want?”
“She wanted to know how Meemaw was. I told her what I knew. Have you heard anything else about her condition?”
“Haven’t heard this morning. And that’s another thing. What if Nephew and Haley have a heatstroke out there at Elmwood?”
No way I was going to get back on that subject.
“She said she saw the murderer and he saw her and that’s why she’s hiding.”
“Well, my Lord.”
“She also said she climbed out of the trailer window when he tried to come in the bedroom door.”
There was a long pause on Sister’s end of the line. I could see her picturing Meemaw’s trailer. I waited.
“That’s interesting,” she said, finally.
“Yes, it is.”
“Call Haley. I’ll see you at the wedding.”
A dial tone. Sister drives me nuts doing this, hanging up without so much as a goodbye.
I went to get Woofer’s diamond necklace. Muffin was sitting on the kitchen table looking at me as I came back through. “You’re not allowed up there,” I told her. Muffin yawned.
Haley and Philip got married. There was music, something classical that I didn’t recognize. The girls at the florist had come through with a large elegant arrangement of white flowers. Haley and Philip walked down the aisle together while the photographer crawled across our feet to get a good shot. When they reached the altar, a young man and woman who had been sitting across from us got up to stand with them. Philip’s children.
Haley looked beautiful; Philip looked handsome. Neither looked sweaty or red in the face. They said their vows clearly while I snuffled all my green makeup off onto tissues.
Mary Alice sat across from us on the groom’s side. “Well, he is my nephew by marriage,” she explained at lunch. “And it looked bare over there. It’s tacky to take sides at such a small wedding anyhow.”
We had a private dining room at the Merritt House, a beautiful Victorian home on Birmingham’s Southside, just a few blocks from where Debbie and Henry live. Debbie had made it to the wedding, but Henry showed up for the lunch by himself explaining she couldn’t face food.
We met Philip’s daughter Jenny, and his son, Matthew. I reminded Fred they were now our step-grandchildren so he should be especially nice to them.
“Which is which?” he asked.
“Matthew is the one with the long blond hair.”
Fred squinted at Matthew. “Tell me he’s not wearing makeup.”
“Neither one of them is,” I assured him.
Fred rolled his eyes, but he went over to introduce himself.
Haley and Philip floated into the room. Hugs. Kisses. Champagne toasts. Beautiful and delicious food. Lisa, my daughter-in-law, leaned around Fred and informed me it was the best salmon she had ever put in her mouth, and weren’t Philip’s children precious?
“Precious,” Fred said. I gave him a slight kick and he grinned. “And to think they’re our step-grandchildren now.”
“You deserve it,” Lisa said.
I gave him another kick, this one a little harder. He yelped which startled Lisa.
“Fish bone.” Fred pointed in the general direction of his mouth.
“Well, be careful, Pop. I haven’t seen a single bone.”
“I will,” Fred assured her, touching his thumb and forefinger delicately to his lips to extract the nonexistent bone. “Got it.”
“Good.” Lisa turned back to Alan. I turned to my right and talked to Ray.
Yes, indeed, Sunshine was fine. Three o’clock in the morning. She said to tell him she loved him.
Had she? I didn’t remember. But Ray looked pleased.
“She’ll be back probably tonight. She’s going to go talk to the sheriff this afternoon.”
Well, it was a wedding. A little lying is necessary.
Then the cake. The waiters cleared the table and we could hear them conversing in the hall. Then the door opened and two of them wheeled in the wedding cake, the most unusual wedding cake I have ever seen. Instead of a two- or three-tier cake with a bride and groom on the top, this seemed to be a huge mushroom.
Mary Alice stood up and saw that the waiters placed the cake just right, the more sloping side of the mushroom toward the wedding couple.
“Voilà,” she said to Haley and Philip. “You’ll never guess what it is!”
Haley and Philip looked at each other. “A mushroom?” Philip guessed.
“Close. I’ll tell you because you’ll never get it. You know what today is?”
“August sixth,” Haley said. “It’s Philip’s birthday.”
None of us had known this. There were calls of “Happy birthday” and a few claps. Haley leaned over and kissed him.
“But,” Sister said, holding up her hands to hush us, “on the day Philip was born, there was another earthshaking event. It was a big day all around.”
Fred and I looked at each other. We had both realized at the same time. “It’s an atom bomb cake,” he murmured.
“It’s an atom bomb cake,” Mary Alice announced. “Fireworks for your wedding day.”
“It explodes?” Haley asked, moving back slightly.
“Of course not. That was a metaphor.”
A metaphor? Sister was getting a lot out of her writing classes at UAB. I was downright proud of her.
Everyone, including the two waiters, crowded around to see the atom bomb cake.
“Who made it?” Henry wanted to know. He was looking at the cake with a chef’s eye.
“Some lady in Homewood. She does all kinds of specialty items.”
“Somebody get a picture before we cut it,” Haley said.
“How are we going to cut it?” Philip asked.
Sister handed him a cake knife. “It doesn’t matter. Just dive in. One side doesn’t have coconut because not everybody likes coconut. I, for one, hate coconut. It keeps getting bigger the more I chew it.”
Fred was laughing so hard he had to sit down. Pretty soon he had his face in his napkin, his elbows propped on the table.
“Is he all right?” Sister asked me as she began to pass out cake. “Fred, you want some atom bomb wedding cake?”
Fred looked up, tears streaming. “I love you, Mary Alice.”
“I love you, too, Fred.” She pulled me aside. “Do you think we ought to call 911?”
Fred giggled all the way home. “An atom bomb wedding cake. Do you know, honey, I think that’s top on my list of Mary Alice stunts.”
“Just because it’s the most recent.” I was thinking about the happy look on Haley’s face as she and Philip got in his car.
“But think about it, honey. The ultimate weapon of destruction with coconut on half of it.” He wiped his eyes.
“She meant well.”
“And the look on Philip’s face. And them trying to cut it.”
“You didn’t have to tell them you wanted half coconut.”
“I couldn’t resist.”
“Well, we’ll always remember Philip’s birthday. And their wedding cake.”
Fred laughed harder. Usually I’m the one who cracks up over black humor, but I was still too distracted by the wedding.
Arthur Phizer was out in his yard picking up a can some litterer had tossed. He had on a white un dershirt, plaid shorts, dark socks, and wing-tip shoes. Arthur, Mitzi says, isn’t quite ready for the millennium.
“Hey,” he called. “How did it go?”
Fred went to tell him about the atom bomb wedding cake. I walked into a house that seemed strangely empty. I went back to the kitchen to get a drink of water, and Muffin looked up from the table and meowed.
I pulled out a cha
ir, sat down, and stroked her. I told her about the wedding, about the atomic bomb cake, how happy her mama had seemed. She purred. As I heard the back door open, I whispered to her that she didn’t have to get down unless she wanted to, that she was to pay no attention to that cross old man because she was a good pussycat, yes she was.
“Aunt Pat?”
I jumped.
“Sorry.” Ray pulled out a chair and sat down across from me. “Uncle Fred said you were in here.”
“I thought you were him—he—whatever coming in.” Sometimes English grammar gets the best of all of us.
“Nope. It’s me. I came by to find out some more about Sunshine.”
“You want a big glass of ice water?”
“That would be great.”
I fixed us both one and sat back down at the kitchen table, pulling off my shoes. “You want me to start at the beginning?”
“Please.”
I started with the doorbell ringing at three o’clock in the morning and didn’t spare any details this time except my suspicion that Sunshine was staying with Dwayne. I told Ray a friend. I also told him about the windows and doors, or lack of them, in the trailer.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I shrugged. I heard the front door open and Fred head for the bedroom. I drank my water and idly rolled the small pebble that had never gotten thrown away toward Muffin. She slapped it onto the floor and Ray reached down and picked it up.
“My Lord, Aunt Pat.”
“I’m sorry, Ray. I know I ought to be able to tell you more, but I just don’t know her that well.”
Ray looked at me strangely. “Do you know anything about black pearls, Aunt Pat?”
The shift in conversation confused me for a moment. “It’s one of Elizabeth Taylor’s perfumes. Pretty exotic. I tried it down at Rich’s one day, and I really prefer one more citrusy.”
“This, Aunt Pat. You don’t know what this is, do you?”
I leaned over and looked at the rock in the palm of his hand. It had a greenish hue but I guessed, “Black pearl?”
“A beautiful one. Where did it come from?”
“Meemaw and Sunshine were playing Chinese checkers with them.” I took what I had thought was a pretty rock from Ray. “They’re expensive, aren’t they?”
“You better believe it. That baby you’re holding would run at least ten thousand dollars and up.”
And I had almost thrown it away. I had been rolling it around for the cat to play with. “Fred!” I screeched. “Get in here!”
He came to the door zipping his shorts. “What?”
I held up the stone. “This is a black pearl. Ray says it’s worth maybe ten thousand dollars.”
“Are you serious?”
“God’s truth. Ask him.”
“It’s true, Uncle Fred. Black pearls are a big business in Bora Bora. The biggest next to tourism.” Ray took the pearl back. “This is a beautiful one. A touch of polishing and the green color will really show.”
Fred took the pearl from Ray. “And they’re expensive?”
“You better believe it. The whole process takes forever. They grow the oysters for a couple of years, seed them, and then harvest them three years later. That’s five years, and then only a few of the oysters will have made pearls. Especially this size.”
“There were a bunch of them on Meemaw’s table.”
Ray’s face darkened. “I think we’ve just found out what’s caused all the trouble out at the Turketts’.”
“Is it illegal to bring them in?” Fred asked.
“No. They can be shipped in legally. There are a couple of companies that grow most of them and ship them around the world. It’s like farming, Uncle Fred. There are a few small operations, but if they don’t have a good harvest, they can’t weather it. And believe me, the Turketts’ couldn’t have afforded to buy any or pay the import on them.”
“Maybe they didn’t know what they were,” I said. “They were out on the table like they were nothing.”
“I hope so.” Ray got up and went to the phone.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“The sheriff. Whether she knew about them or not, Sunshine’s in big trouble.”
There was a knock on the kitchen door. Fred went to open it.
“I knocked, Fred. Remember that. You’re always fussing when I don’t.” Sister sailed in. “I saw Ray’s car was here, and I came to have a good postmortem on the wedding.”
“Bad choice of words,” Ray said. Then into the phone, “Yes, I’d like the number of the Blount County sheriff’s office, please.”
Sister clunked her purse down on the counter with such a noise that Muffin ran from the room. “What’s he calling the sheriff for?”
“This.” I held up the stone.
“A rock?”
“It’s a black pearl. It’s the one I picked up in Meemaw’s trailer. Remember? She and Sunshine were playing Chinese checkers with them.”
Mary Alice sat down in the chair Ray had vacated and took the pearl. “It’s green,” she said.
“Ray says it’s a black pearl, though, and worth a lot of money,” Fred said.
“Then what were Meemaw and Sunshine doing with them?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, but they obviously didn’t know what they were or they wouldn’t have been playing with them.”
Sister turned the pearl, looking at it from all angles. “Maybe this is what the Indian was after.”
“That’s why Ray’s calling the sheriff.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. Black pearls.”
“Let me see it again,” Fred said.
Ray came back to the table. “He’s out fishing or something. They said they’d try to get hold of him and have him call me. I gave him this number and my number at home.”
“How do you know this is a black pearl, Ray?” his mother asked.
“They sell them in all the stores in Bora Bora, Mama. You can buy an imperfect one on a tiny chain for maybe two thousand dollars. The large, perfect ones are sent to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and sell for God knows how much. But there’s a sizable market for them here in the U.S., too. Anyway, I’ve seen a lot of them.” He sat down and reached for the pearl. “This one is a honey.”
“Then how”—Mary Alice spoke the question that was on all our minds—”did they end up in a trailer in Locust Fork, Alabama?”
“Because someone there had just gotten back from Bora Bora.”
This had to be painful for Ray to say. Fred, Mary Alice, and I looked at each other.
“But maybe she didn’t know what she had. Maybe someone stuck them in her suitcase and she didn’t know anything about it. And that’s what that Dudley Indian guy was doing there. He knew the pearls had come in and he came to get them.” Mary Alice was talking so fast she was almost out of breath.
“I suppose it’s possible,” Ray admitted.
“Of course it’s possible,” I agreed.
“What I want to know is how someone would get them,” Fred said. “You say they’re farmed? I know this is a simplification, but couldn’t you buy some from the farmers?”
“Not as an individual. It’s pretty much a cartel.” Ray rubbed the pearl against his sleeve. “And that suits the French government fine. Bora Bora’s one of the few Polynesian islands that’s paying its way.”
“I keep forgetting Bora Bora is French,” Mary Alice said.
Ray smiled. “Mama, you keep thinking I’m in Pago Pago.”
“Is that French?”
“That’s American.”
“Well, Lord. Those islands are so messed up. Do they have black pearls in Pago Pago?”
Fred tapped his fingernails on the table. We all looked at him. “Ray, how would one go about getting black pearls then?”
“Pay a mint for them or steal them.” Ray looked at the pearl. “And I don’t know anybody who could buy a bunch of these.”
“How would you go about stealing them?” Fred wanted
to know.
“The only way I know you could get away with it would be to rob the oyster beds.” He pointed to the three-tiered wire basket I keep potatoes and onions hanging in. “You see Aunt Pat’s basket there? That’s sort of like the contraption they put the oysters in. They seed them and put them in the baskets and lower them into the lagoons. I suppose a diver could snip off a basket, but he’d sure be taking a hell of a chance.” Ray thought for a moment. “Let’s put it this way. He wouldn’t be treated with much compassion by the authorities if he were caught.”
“But if he weren’t caught,” I said, “he’d be sitting on a gold mine.”
“If he were lucky enough to get some good oysters.” Ray thought for a moment. “And then he’d have to smuggle them off the island and into another country.”
Which would be where a cute blonde in a pink sundress would come in handy.
“You say they’re seeded,” Fred said. “What do they seed them with?”
“You’re not going to believe this. They use freshwater mussels from right here in the Tennessee River. Use a little bead of the shell as a nucleus. Practically every pearl you see a woman wearing had its start right here in Alabama or Tennessee.”
I ran the string of pearls I was wearing through my fingers. From the Tennessee River. “Do you think a person living in Muscle Shoals would know this?”
“They might. It’s a big business. Mostly one big company.”
The telephone rang and all of us jumped.
“I’ll get it,” Fred said. He talked quietly for a moment, then hung up and said, “That was Henry. He’s taking Debbie to the emergency room at University. She’s bleeding.”
Seventeen
“Things come in threes,” Sister said as we were on our way to the hospital. “First there was the Indian’s murder, then Sunshine’s kidnapping, then Meemaw’s sunstroke, then Haley’s wedding, and now this.”
“That’s five.”
“I know. That’s what’s worrying me.” She made an illegal U-turn on Nineteenth Street and whirled into the valet parking. A different guy, young, probably a student at UAB, stepped out of the booth to greet us.