“And then I got sick and she stole him,” Granny said in an accusatory tone.
Pastor Henrietta put up a hand to indicate Granny needed to let Amelia continue.
Granny’s voice was enough to bring Amelia out of her reverie and continue the story. “Ferdinand and I were set to be married in a month. I panicked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry him, but telling my parents would have done no good. I saw my chance when Hermiony came down with pneumonia. I ran into Robert one night when I was in the hayloft of the barn looking at the stars and wondering what I should do. He thought I was Hermiony. She used to sneak out and meet him in secret because our parents so disapproved of Robert. It was then I knew what I had to do.”
Amelia sneaked a peak out of the corner of her eye at her sister. Granny sat silently, a sad expression on her face.
“I put on my Hermiony act and he thought I was you. Hermiony and I always told each other everything in those days so I could answer whatever he asked.” Turning to the others, she explained, “We would share our deepest secrets. I knew everything about her relationship with Robert.”
Granny looked at her sister and in a sad voice said, “I trusted you with everything that was in me.”
“I know you did, but you have to understand how desperate I was. I wasn’t as brave as you. I couldn’t stand up to mother and father and tell them I didn’t want to marry Ferdinand. I didn’t have the courage and so I pretended to be you. When Robert asked me to run away with him I said yes. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I was so confused and Robert was so charming.”
“And he never found out?” Delight broke in on the story.
“Not for two years,” Amelia said sadly.
Granny’s brow wrinkled, “Well, I’m confused. How did you marry him if he didn’t know you weren’t me?”
“We went to Las Vegas and got married in a chapel there.” Amelia hesitated, stealing a glance at her sister and then said in a soft voice, “I, ah, signed your name.”
Granny stood up. “You signed my name? I was married to Robert Blackford and didn’t know it? And then I married Ferdinand Fiddlestadt. I was a bigamist? How could you do that to me?”
Frowning, Pastor Henrietta pulled Granny back down in her chair and shook her head. “I suppose it was possible in those days for that sort of mix-up to happen as there were no computers, and records weren’t shared all over the country. There was no reason when they issued your marriage license, Hermiony, for anyone to check.”
Amelia was about to continue her story when they heard the lift in the funeral home moving.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The women froze as if playing the childhood game Statue. Granny held up a finger to her lips, indicating they should all be quiet. Mavis moved to the door of the room to make sure it was shut and turned the light off. They could hear Giles Graves and Granny’s son-in-law, Butch, talking as the lift stopped. Butch worked for Giles Graves from time to time.
Granny opened the door a tiny crack and closed it again. “They’re bringing someone up on the lift,” she whispered to the others.
The women all whispered at once, “Who?”
“Are they dead?” Mavis asked with a shaky voice.
Granny turned to the women and shook her head, “It’s under a sheet. What’s your guess?” The women all started to mumble.
“Quiet!” Granny whispered. They all repeated the word after her. Granny shook her head and hoped Giles and Butch hadn’t heard. No one would believe this night gathering wasn’t her idea.
Soon they heard the voices of others joining Mr. Graves and Butch in the front room.
“That sounds like Thor and the Tall Guy.”
“Shh!” Granny motioned to Pastor Henrietta to be quiet. “We don’t want them to find us.”
Granny and Mavis put their ears to the door to see if they could hear what was being said. Delight moved quietly across the room and turned the lock on the handle of the door. “They’ll have to break the door down,” she mouthed to the others in the room, but they couldn’t make out what she was trying to convey through her silent words because of the darkness of the room.
Amelia’s cell phone pinged. She quickly turned off the sound and picked up the phone to see who was calling. She shuffled her way through the dark room over to Granny and held the phone up for her to see.
Granny frowned and whispered, “It’s 2:00 a.m. Why would Thor be calling you at 2:00 a.m.?” They both looked at the closed door.
Amelia began to shake. “Someone’s dead and in the next room. Thor’s in the next room and he’s calling me?” her whisper conveyed the panic she was feeling. “I’m going out there.”
“You can’t! We’ll all get into trouble,” Delight warned.
The men talking in the next room moved closer to the door. The women heard the knob turn. “It’s locked,” they heard the Tall Guy say.
“The key’s at home. I must have accidently locked the door to the room when I left,” they heard Mr. Graves explain.
“I can’t get a hold of Amelia; she’s probably sleeping and doesn’t hear the phone,” Thor concluded.
“Well, there’s nothing she can do right now anyway. We know she didn’t have anything to do with Justine ending up dead in her chocolate factory. We can talk to her in the morning. We have Lars’s statement since he’s the one who found her,” the Tall Guy told him.
The women listening at the door gave a gasp.
The Tall Guy asked the others, “Did you hear that?”
“Oh, it was probably nothing; this old building has a lot of creaks and groans. Probably all the old ghosts,” Giles Graves laughed.
“Well, since ol’ Gravy here locked us out of his snack room so we could get some coffee, we’ll just head over to the station and grab some there. I don’t think there’s going to be any rest for us tonight.” Thor patted the Tall Guy on the back.
“I have a hardware store to run in the morning,” Butch reminded them. “Good luck.”
“Gravy, you might as well come on over and have some coffee with us,” Thor said to the funeral director, “It’ll keep you awake. I imagine your day is going to be just as long as ours.”
As the men left the funeral home, Giles Graves’s loud voice could be heard asking the Tall Guy if he thought this murder had anything to do with the murders out at Granny’s farm.
Granny and the others strained against the back room door to hear his answer.
“Too soon to tell, Giles; we don’t even know if Justine’s death was a murder, but we did find out what killed Robert Blackford. You were a big help in helping us figure out that puzzle.”
The women then heard silence. They stepped away from the office door and were quiet until they were sure everyone was gone. Pastor Henrietta turned the light back on.
Silence filled the room as the women were still in shock hearing that Justine, who ran the jewelry counter at AbStract, was dead.
“Now what?” Mavis asked.
“We finish the story,” Pastor Henrietta answered.
“Well, we can’t stay here. What if Gravy comes back to work with the body?” Granny announced.
Delight in a jittery voice asked, “Didn’t you hear Gravy say there were ghosts here?”
“Yup, there’s one right in back of you,” Granny teased.
Delight jumped and turned around. The others laughed. Delight got the joke and laughed too.
“Why don’t we all go over to my house,” Amelia suggested. “We can finish the story and when the police come to tell me about Justine, you’ll all be there to help me pretend shock.”
“That’s a great idea. In case George wakes up from the spell I put on him last night and realizes I haven’t been home all night, we’ll tell him we had a slumber party at your house just like you and Granny used to do.”
“Mavis, that’s a great idea.” Lulu who’d been silent since all this started, chimed in, “We can tell them that we wanted to remind you two of your past so you can go on to your
future.”
All of the women stared at Lulu with amazed looks on their faces. Pastor Henrietta patted Lulu’s cheek, “Such wisdom, my dear; you have grown so much tonight in spirit. You will be truly blessed.”
“Yah, and if someone finds out we were here, we’ll just tell them we were having a séance in the funeral home and Lulu’s spirit found wisdom and channeled itself through Lulu, and it’s going to be my next reality show.” Mavis smiled at the thought.
Unlocking the door to the office, Granny stuck her head into the dark front room. “All clear.” She motioned the others to follow.
“How are we going to get to Amelia’s house? She’s not on the underground streets.” Delight pointed out.
“We can’t go out the front door; they might still be on the streets on the way to the police station,” Amelia warned.
“Well, we can’t go back to my house,” Granny told them. “George or Silas or Penelope might see us leave the house.”
“We could take the underground streets to the Pink Percolator, but then we’d have to walk to Amelia’s, and the Pink Percolator is right down the street from the Police Station so they might see us.” Delight shook her head at another roadblock to getting out of the Funeral Home.
“What if we took the hearse from the garage? The garage opens in the other direction, so they wouldn’t see us take it out. We could drive through the back alleys to Rack’s and leave the hearse in the parking lot. We could wipe our fingerprints off. Since its dark and the hearse is black, it will be hard for someone to see it, and if they did, they’d think Gravy was having a clandestine meeting with his girlfriend.” Amelia realized what she’d just said and started to stammer, “Well, uh, um, someone told me he might have a girlfriend.”
“It’s clear you don’t get subterfuge very well, Amelia,” Granny addressed her with a disbelieving tone. “You don’t think Thor and the Tall Guy and Franklin would suspect that possibly we took the hearse since we weren’t home all night?”
Granny continued, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to go back down to the underground street and we’re going to use the hole to the alley that the shysters use to get in and out of the streets. The city didn’t close it up because since the shysters are the ones that led us to the underground streets, the officials felt they should be allowed to continue to use it. They widened it a little bit for Baskerville. We should be able to fit through there.”
“I get it,” Delight commented, excited that she’d caught on to Granny’s plan.” We sneak down the alley to the next street and take the back alleys to Amelia’s.”
Mavis reminded them, “Be careful; apparently we have a killer on the loose.”
At the word killer, Delight and Lulu grabbed each other’s hands and shrank back into the room.
“We better go,” Granny advised, “Gravy might be back.”
Silently, they moved through the front room to the lift.
Lulu hung back. Can’t we take a peek at Justine? She was such a nice girl. I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“No, we have to get out of here before we’re discovered. And if we get caught looking at Justine in the middle of the night, they might think we killed her and are here to get rid of the evidence.” Granny reached out and grabbed Lulu to bring her along with the rest of them.
As the lift reached the underground street and the floor closed up, they heard the latch being opened to the funeral home door. Gravy was back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The journey to Amelia’s house was smooth. The only things in the back alleys in the middle of the night were the cats and dogs out on their nighttime routines. Fuchsia didn’t have a leash law. The entire community embraced each other’s pets and watched out for them. If some of the pets got a little unruly, they would talk to their pet parents and the pet parents would take care of it. The one thing the City of Fuchsia did do was to offer free spay and neutering so pet families did not get out of control.
Once safe at Amelia’s, the women were jovial because they hadn’t been discovered. They were about to sit down at Amelia’s kitchen table to hear the rest of the story when Mavis spoke up, “I don’t know about you all, but I think I need to sleep; this has been a bit too much reality for me.”
“Me too,” Lulu agreed.
“Do you have a few couches where we can crash for a couple of hours, Amelia?” Delight looked around for somewhere soft to settle for a few winks.
“Good idea! Then maybe we’ll get the story straight and we can plan. I have three bedrooms and I finished the basement and there’s a sofa bed down there. Take your pick!” Amelia indicated the basement door as she moved down the hall to her room.
“I’ll take the couch up here and stand guard,” said Granny as she plopped herself down on the couch that Delight had been eyeing.
“I remember the basement. Granny and I have fond memories of makeovers and the basement window. I want to see what Amelia’s done to it, so I’ll sleep watch in the basement in case someone comes in through the lake tunnel,” Mavis said as she proceeded down the basement steps.
“I’ll go with you; there must be room for two on that couch. Do you snore?” Pastor Henrietta asked, following Mavis down the steps.
“I guess we get the two bedrooms, Lulu. See you in a couple of hours. It’s almost daylight now,” Delight yawned as she and Lulu navigated the hallway to the bedrooms.
Granny lay down on the couch and fluffed the couch pillow. Poor Justine! What had happened to her? Could it have had anything to do with Jack Puffleman coming out of AbStract in the middle of the night? She had died at Amelia’s Chocolate Factory so it didn’t make sense that Jack Puffleman would have a part in it. Or did it? Granny’s eyes closed and she fell asleep with visions of Justine’s cold, lifeless, covered body in her head.
The doorbell’s ring woke Granny out of her uneasy sleep. She looked around and it appeared no one else had heard the doorbell. She could hear soft snores coming from the other rooms. Glancing at her cell phone as she pulled it out of her pocket, she saw that it was 6:00 a.m. She assumed the Tall Guy and Thor couldn’t wait any longer to tell Amelia about what had happened to Justine.
Sitting up from her reclining position, she steadied herself before rising to answer Amelia’s door.
Opening the door, she saw the Tall Guy but no Thor. She wondered where her son was––hopefully at the hospital helping his wife have her new grandchild.
“Why, Ephraim! Why are you here so early in the morning?”
“I’m so sorry if I woke you up, Amelia, but I have some bad news. We tried to call you last night but you weren’t answering your phone.”
“Oh, yes. Well, I was very tired. I had a few friends over and we talked until all hours of the night. We had a little slumber party like we used to do when we were younger, but we’re so old we fell asleep around ten. You can hear by the soft snoring that my guests are still here. Just can’t party like we used to. Come in, but we should whisper so we don’t wake anyone.”
The Tall Guy came into the house and Granny gestured for him to sit at Amelia’s table. “Can I make you some coffee?” Granny looked over at the counter where Amelia had one of those newfangled, one-cup fast coffee machines. “I need my coffee first thing in the morning.” Granny moved to make a cup.
“You’re sure a lot like Granny, Amelia; she likes her coffee first thing in the morning too. Thor’s on his way over to talk to her.”
“Really? You needed to talk to both of us?”
“I’m afraid something has happened at your factory, Amelia. Lars took care of it last night but you need to be told and Lars is still being questioned.”
“Questioned about what?”
Footsteps could be heard on the basement stairs. Granny rushed to open the door for Mavis.
“Mavis, the Tall Guy came by to tell me that something happened at my factory last night. Maybe you should wake up the others.” Granny winked at Mavis. “Make sure when you go into my
bedroom and wake Granny up that you tell her that Thor is looking for her at her house.”
Mavis frowned and looked from the Tall Guy to Granny, confused. The frown on her face continued as she put her face close to Granny’s and looked closely in her eyes. She hesitated before answering, “Okay, Amelia, I can do that. Wow, this will make a great reality show. I think I’ll call it, The Ol’ Switcheroo.”
Granny and the Tall Guy watched as Mavis went to wake up the others.
Granny turned back to the Tall Guy. “It’s so nice of Granny to share her friends with me. Last night we put the past to rest for a little while so we could have a stroll down memory lane.” She gave the Tall Guy a sweet Amelia-type smile.
Before the Tall Guy could respond, Mavis, Delight, Lulu and Amelia could be heard whispering in the hallway.
The words, “I get it; I get it,” rose above the whispering.
Granny looked at the Tall Guy and explained, “Granny occasionally has a hard time understanding, and she gets confused at times, poor dear.”
“Can’t a woman get any beauty sleep around here?” Amelia barked in Granny’s typical tone as she led the group into the kitchen. She addressed the Tall Guy, “You’re interrupting our party––the sleep part of it, at least!”. Going over to Granny and giving her a quick hug, she continued, “And you’ve interrupted the reunion between Amelia and me! She’s no crook, but she’s okay in my book!”
Granny frowned at Amelia trying to do a Granny rhyme and said, “Yes, well, Granny, it appears something terrible has happened and we need to let this nice detective tell us about it.”
Pastor Henrietta, who’d stayed in the basement so she wouldn’t be seen, listened with her ear to the door. Mavis and she had agreed that Pastor Henrietta would stay hidden in case the Tall Guy caught on to their sleuthing plan. This way they’d have at least one member of their group incognito.
Amelia, speaking in Granny’s voice, made a request. “Amelia, I need to talk to you. Sorry Tall Guy, your bad news has to wait. I need Amelia to help me with my girdle; it’s holding too much in and it has to be let out––right now!”
Granny Forks A Fugitive (Fuchsia Minnesota Book 4) Page 10