Mummers' Curse

by Gillian Roberts

  No dark secrets, not an incriminating or intimidating word.

  “Of course,” Mackenzie said, “doesn’t matter if you really have somethin’ worth their concern. Only matters if they think you do.”

  “Yes,” I said, with an anticipatory sigh. “They seem to think the article is going to show their flaws in a hard light, to fan some unknown fire.”

  I took his hand and we sat in silence across from our unfanned but crackling fire.

  “So you’ll leave it to me,” Mackenzie said.

  I debated whether that was a question, decided it was not, and therefore let it go unanswered. He could think what he needed to, and I could do what I needed to. This way, everybody was contented. Even the feline.

  Particularly the feline. I became aware of an extremely loud purr from the floor in front of my feet.

  We both looked down as Macavity looked up, his paw in mid–face wash, his eyes dreamy with satiation.

  The humans processed the clues at the same time, stood up in unison, turned, and looked at the white box on the table.

  Empty, except for grease spots.

  Macavity’s purr registered a nine on the Richter scale.

  Eleven

  “I DON’T THINK I EVER ACTUALLY INTRODUCED MYSELF.”

  I extended my hand to Emily Semow. I had already removed my gloves and unbuttoned my coat. The place was still a blast furnace, smelling of heating ducts, dust, and cardboard.

  I had called ahead, so I had to assume she expected me. Nonetheless, she raised her eyebrows when I spoke, and looked around me through the plate-glass windows, as if to check whether I had an accomplice lurking outside.

  “My name’s Amanda Pepper.”

  “Knew it,” she said. “Unless you’re called Associated Press. You wrote it enough on the pen-testing pads. So, um…you’re back again, aren’t you?”

  “Emily?” The querulous voice I remembered from my last visit came out of the back room. “Time for my pills.”

  “Busy!” she shouted. “A customer. They’re next to you.” There was no further response.

  She was dressed in black again, this time suede boots up to her thighs, black tights, and a black silk tunic. “In mourning, I guess,” I said, gesturing toward her ensemble.

  She looked down to refresh her memory, grimaced, and then shrugged. Her face was nothing if not expressive. “No. Well, yes. Even if nobody believes we were getting married. Somebody even told me I should see a shrink to get a handle on reality. But of course, the somebody who said that was a Grassi. Won’t leave me alone.”

  “I want to talk about something else,” I said.

  “I know. The story.”

  “Let me be absolutely honest. I’m a school teacher. I have no money.”

  “You came here to tell me that? Thanks a lot and join the crowd. You think we make money in this place? Some people, they act like I’m an heiress, I’ll inherit my family business.” She laughed harshly. “My father, he’s not well. We pay the doctor’s bills, and then there’s enough for maybe a pair of stockings. I have to keep the store open whenever I can to catch an extra nickel or dime.” She sighed, then looked beyond me, outside again. “Listen,” she said, “did you pass anybody when you came in? Anybody, like, hanging nearby?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m being watched,” she said. “Since Jimmy Pat, maybe even before he died. It’s weird, the person who…ah, maybe the Grassis are right and I’m crazy.” Once again, I heard the mirthless sound that passed for her laughter.

  “Now?” I looked outside. Nothing except a short woman pulling a shopping cart and a taller and younger woman pushing a carriage. Maybe Emily had delusions of persecution.

  “People these days, they go to the discounters,” she said. “Everything’s falling apart for the little guy like me, and even though I have ideas for how to make this place better, if he’d—” she moved her head in the direction of the dark back room “—let me, with wholesalers gobbling everything up, I don’t see how…”

  To my relief, she paused to glance out the window again, and while so doing, and, like me, finding nobody watching her back, she seemed to recognize that she had gotten herself off track. “My big mouth,” she said. “Like you care about the stationery business.”

  “It’s interesting,” I politely insisted. Fact was, I wanted to get information and head home before dark, there to transfer whatever I learned to Mackenzie who would have, by then, found out who Arthur was. I wanted to extract myself from all of it. So Emily was right. My prime concern wasn’t the woes of the small retailer.

  Unless, of course, the human side of it might make a good article, now that I thought about it.

  “My story,” she prompted. “That’s what you’re here about.”

  “The bottom line is, I can’t offer any money.”

  She tilted her head and raised her eyebrows and without uttering a single word, lifted, lowered, squinted, shrugged, heaved, and twisted her various parts so that she managed to silently chew me out for wasting her time. I was awestruck by how varied, subtle, and rich her body language was. If retailing dribbled into nothingness, she could become a mime.

  “I have another idea,” I said. “A different approach to suggest.”

  She folded her hands across her chest, jutted out one hip, and waited. A body shout of “Oh, yeah? Double-dare you to come up with anything besides money that’s worth my time.”

  “What if we did it on spec?” That sounded wondrously professional.

  “What the hell’s a spec to do it on?”

  “Short for speculation. Conjecture. Supposition.”

  “What the hell is all of that?”

  “We do it without a contract, in the hopes of selling it.”

  Her arms dropped and she walked to the front door. I was afraid she was going to open it and usher me out, but instead she stood there, again examining the street scene. She leaned forward, muttering to herself. “He’s there. I feel it.”

  “Who?” I said. “Do you know him? Does he bother you?”

  “Nah.”

  I didn’t know which question she was answering, but before I could find out, she returned to the point of my visit. “You’re saying I should give you my story. Free. Give it away.”

  “Not really, because once it sold, we’d split everything we get for it. Fifty-fifty, down the middle.”

  “What’s that come to?”

  “Varies.”

  “People sell stories to the supermarket papers for like a hundred thousand dollars.”

  I could kiss her information good-bye. I’d seen three cents a word mentioned in a writer’s magazine. My mental math wasn’t of the highest order, but I estimated that in order to make enough to pay Emily her hundred thousand, I’d have to write twenty-five thousand pages, and there’s not a big market for articles that are longer than entire encyclopedias.

  I had been lolling against the counter that held the cash register, but now I stood up straight. “Good luck with the story, then,” I said. “I’d also like that kind of money, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

  “You’re leaving? Like that?”

  I translated that as meaning we had bargaining room.

  “Emily?” the old man called out. “I’m thirsty.”

  “I’m working!” she shouted. Then she turned to me, waiting.

  “Those big numbers, they’re stories that get national press.”

  Emily shrugged. “My story’s pretty big. Maybe.”

  With the “maybe,” our positions, which had seemed wildly and unfairly weighted, shifted into potential harmony. But at that precise moment, the door, which neither of us had been watching, opened with the loud clang of the bell, and Dolores Grassi and I, mouths agape, stared at each other.

  “You!” she shouted, as if I were the Black Plague. “Again!”

  “Yo!” Emily said. “Do you mind? You buying something? Otherwise—”

  Dolores swiveled toward her.
“I’m here because you’re such a bitch you didn’t listen when my brothers told you to cut it out! Who are you, you crazy old maid, to go around bad-mouthing me and my Jimmy Pat, saying he wasn’t in love with me? Wasn’t going to marry me? Was going to marry you? You’re so desperate you have to shame me and my family—and a dead man—to get attention?”

  “He wasn’t going to marry you, and you know it.”

  “Liar!” Dolores looked at me. “Can you believe this? A girl’s two weeks from her wedding, and this…this nobody talks trash about her.” She pointed at Emily. “You can’t stand it, you never could stand that he chose me, but that’s how it was.”

  “He was marrying me,” Emily said in a flat and final voice.

  “What’s the point of all these lies except to ruin everything—everything—for me and my entire family? I won’t have a wedding, you go around insulting us, saying horrible things about the man I loved, who’s dead already, and now you’re ruining his funeral. Give it up. He can’t marry anybody now, are you satisfied?”

  “You saying I killed him? You out of your mind?”

  “Everybody knows you wouldn’t kill anything in pants if you thought it’d get you out of here. Not that I blame you for wanting something better.” She sniffed, as if the air in the store were odiferous. “You’re your father’s slave, and you don’t have a profession of your own, and—”

  “Emily!” the voice in back called out on cue, as if anybody needed further explanation of what needed escaping. He had remarkably good lungs for an invalid.

  “In a minute. More customers!” Emily shouted. Then, in a lower but no less harsh voice, she spoke to Dolores. “I’m not anybody’s slave,” she said. “And I’m not a baby the way you are. Baby tyrant. Your brothers are your slaves—like you’re five years old or something, guardin’ you. Act like a grown-up for once, why don’t you? I know he told you.”

  “Never!”

  “He told me he told you.”

  “Then he lied to you!”

  “Never!”

  I looked out the window above the faded and dusty school supply display, across the street, to a bus stop in front of a house with a cemented-over front lawn, a khaki-painted facade, and an aluminum awning over the front door. As I watched, a bus slowed and opened its doors. A silver-haired man in leather jacket and jeans shook his head and waved it on. He was staying. Arthur was Emily’s stalker?

  Arthur wasn’t going anywhere. Not that he was inert, but at best, he was semi-ert, positioned so that he could see everything that happened on the street, but it was not lounging weather. Everyone else out there hurried for shelter.

  “Think you’re so high and mighty you can flounce in here and boss me around, but you’re wrong!” Emily raged on behind me. “This is private property, and I don’t happen to think Grassis are above the law, right below God, the way you do.”

  “You’ve been jealous of me my whole life.” Dolores sounded whiny now. “And I tried to be nice. When your mother died—”

  “I didn’t need your charity!”

  “Yeah, right, like you didn’t need my fiancé now, either!”

  This was not age-appropriate behavior, as people of my ilk say. Without adult intervention, they could go on like this forever. I’d seen it on playgrounds. “Stop that right now!” my Miss Grundy voice snapped. “This is childish. You’re saying things you’ll regret and making yourselves feel worse, and—”

  Dolores’s hair was still a tall, dark confection, despite the wind she’d walked through. The dark tendrils weren’t snakes, but the look she shot me would have done Medusa proud.

  “She started it!” Emily screamed, maintaining the kindergarten level of dispute. “None of this is my fault! She came here!”

  Dolores took a deep breath. “So now I’m leaving here,” she told her erstwhile rival. “Believe me, this is the last place on earth I want to be. Gives me the creeps and always did. But I want you to know this.” Her voice took on a nervous, knife-sharp edge. “Say any of this is true—if—then the shame is still on your head, because if Jimmy Pat wasn’t going to marry me—”

  “See? I knew he told you. I knew you knew!”

  Dolores held her head up even higher. With the tower of hair, it was quite a sight. “If that was so,” she said, “it wasn’t because he loved you.” She spat out the last three words and made a face, as if they’d tasted poisonous. “It was because he was afraid of you.” She turned around and was out the door in a fraction of a second. “He loved me!” she shouted as she left.

  I expected shouts in response, curses, counter-charges, but instead, Emily, looking diminished and red-nosed, wiped a tear off her cheek.

  “What’s the ruckus?” the voice shouted. “Call the police!”

  “Excuse me,” she said, going into the back room.

  It seemed time for me to leave, too. I’d write a note, leave Emily my number in case she ever wanted to talk. I rummaged in my purse, found one of my many index cards along with the pen I’d bought on my last unsatisfactory visit.

  The doorbell jangled again before I got my first word down, but business hadn’t improved. Dolores, her face frosted pink from wind and fury, was back. “And you!” she said, pointing with one hand while she held the door with the other. “You’re the one stirring up the mess. Look at you, already making notes about my private life! Let sleeping dogs lie. You write about any of this, you disgrace my family name, and you’ll be more than sorry. My brothers don’t take it lightly when people try to drag us down.”

  “Hey, Dolores,” I said, “I’m not responsible for any of this, and I’m not writing about you or—” In the middle of my sentence, she turned and went back outside. Rude! I followed her out the door as I finished what I had to say. Not a single person understood the difference between a phenomenon and a tabloid story about somebody’s personal life. Maybe it was a forest-for-the-trees thing. They were so much a part of the world of the Mummers that they could only see, or even imagine, details and current gossip. The big picture was an unquestioned given.

  I followed Dolores down the street, walking double-time, shouting at her back. “Twenty thousand people paraded,” I shouted. “If I wanted to write about one of them, there are nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others beside Jimmy Pat!”

  She turned and pointed again. Nobody must have told her it was rude. “Don’t be a smart-ass,” she said. “The others aren’t as interesting to somebody like you because they didn’t get themselves killed.”

  “If you would listen—I’m writing about the tradition.”

  She shook her head. “Everybody knows about that. What’s to write?”

  I gave up that tack. “I wouldn’t take advantage of a sad event like a man’s murder.”

  She looked at me dolefully, then surprised me. “I wish I were dead,” she said. “It could have all been so nice.” And she turned and walked away.

  I couldn’t make sense of any of it, except for the implication that I should go home and forget about it. Which is what I prepared to do, as soon as I reclaimed my coat.

  “So it didn’t kill Jimmy Pat, after all.”

  I jumped, even though I recognized the voice and I had seen him earlier.

  His hair still looked as if head-gremlins styled and smoothed it at all times, even during gusts of wind, when mine swirled and tangled and his jostled, then resettled perfectly. Maybe if I used the hair spray I always carried and forgot. Maybe I should ask him his brand.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep scaring me this way,” I said. He was once again carrying a copy of The Prince. He must be committing Machiavelli to memory.

  “Sorry. I saw you barrel out of the store and I was afraid you might get on a bus.” He waved at a departing vehicle, then did a double take, staring after it.

  “Not likely, until I’m wearing a coat,” I muttered.

  “You see that?” he said. “You see what was on that bus? The poster on the side for King’s Sausage? Some creep wrote o
n it.”

  Why act shocked? He’d mentioned the rumors the last time he’d accosted me.

  The black-and-white ads showing sizzling sausages had been attractively understated advertising, with lots of white space and only HAPPY HOLIDAYS and KING’S SAUSAGE. But in the last week or so, I’d seen at least a half dozen of them, all altered the same way. A whose blood had been added along with is in and a question mark, so that the ads now read Whose Blood is in King’s Sausage? Now and then, a driblet of red paint had been added for further effect.

  “Kids,” I said.

  “Not kids.” The words were a growl. He shook his handsome head as if to rid it of the ads. “Enemies. People who think… You were going to contact me,” he said, returning to his smoother voice.

  I shook my head. “You suggested that. Told me to. You didn’t ask me if I would. Besides, they aren’t returning the gun to me. It wasn’t mine in the first place. And—and I’m tired of being frightened this way.”

  “Didn’t mean to scare you. I was in the neighborhood.”

  “Why?”

  “Personal business. So I saw you, and I was about to come into the store when I saw Dolores Grassi.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “Lot of issues those women have to work out on their own. The timing was inappropriate, although believe me, I’d have rather been inside, given my problem with sinus headaches.”

  “I’m having a problem with hypothermia, myself.”

  He wasn’t interested in anything but his own woes. He pressed three black-gloved fingers against the center of his forehead, indicating how he was suffering for his sensitivity. “Whose gun is it, then?”

  I sighed. “You seem to know everything else, including my address—”

  “Me?”

  “And ingenious ways of intimidating me, although why, I don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My cat ate it. And my cat threw it up later on. So much for the world’s most stupid terrorist tactic.” I thought that would upset him, at least insult him, but he only looked amused.

  We had reached the front of the store. “Good-bye, Arthur,” I said. “I can’t see that we have any reason to meet again. And by the way, I don’t appreciate being given a phony business card with no last name.”