by Lois Winston
I moved over to the tree in the corner. The chipped ornament made by my brother Donald set off a groundswell of sorrow. I couldn’t even tell what the squiggle of salt-dough was supposed to be—an icicle maybe—but it stabbed me in the heart. Donald would never be here again to help me through these occasions.
As for my father, the infamous Geraldo Sabala, there was not a trace of him on the tall fir. He’d deserted the family before my earliest memories.
I settled on the floor to leave the seats free for guests. Teddy plopped on the couch next to Maureen. I’d heard about her from my mom, but this was the first time I’d met her. She was older than most of Uncle Beanie’s conquests, but she compensated for her age by being amazingly “put-together,” an apt phrase since she looked like a mannequin. Teddy set right to work complimenting the Christmas designs painted on her fingernails. She responded with a purr laced with soft southern accent.
When Uncle Beanie and my mom strode from the hallway into the living room, tension sparked between them. Uncle Beanie ignored the situation on the couch, and started in afresh about the sleeping arrangements. “Teddy and the kid are sleeping in the RV, aren’t they?”
My mom shushed Uncle Beanie with a quick glance at Brandon, who was busy with the presents, picking each one up as if to gauge its weight. And whether it rattled.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Bea,” Beanie growled. “The kid doesn’t care.”
Brandon whirled. “Care about what?”
My mom locked her arms across her red sweatshirt appliqued with a fuzzy reindeer. “My house, my rules.”
“Rules,” Uncle Beanie snorted, as if to say I don’t need no stinkin’ rules. He hadn’t amassed his fortune by following rules. “Seriously, Bea, I think you were born with that stick up—”
Mom furiously shushed him.
His remark was not something to say to my mother, and no one but Beanie would have dared.
“Is that any way to talk in front of company?” Mom’s face sagged in a way I’d once inspired with my selection of high school boyfriends, an expression that seized my stomach with guilt even as I ignored it.
Beanie merely rolled his eyes. He hauled over a dining room chair and plunked it down near Anna, now seated in a wingchair. From the end of the couch, Nikos shot him a baleful look, as though Nikos wished he’d thought of bringing in a chair to sit by his wife.
Maureen narrowed her eyes as if it were Anna’s fault that Beanie’s shoulder grazed Anna’s red Cashmere sweater, causing the fibers to crackle with electricity.
Even if Beanie had some wild design on Anna, I’ve never understood this impulse in women to blame the other woman instead of their straying man. Still I had to admit Beanie had positioned himself inappropriately close to Anna.
Was he retaliating for Maureen’s coziness with Teddy?
“You could put Maureen in your room,” Uncle Beanie groused to my mom.
“Nikos and Anna are there.”
“We’d be happy to move,” Anna said, scooting over in her chair away from Beanie’s arm.
“No.” My mom raised her foot so she could literally put it down. “The way I’ve arranged things, two people can make use of the master bathroom.” She huffed and escaped to the kitchen before Beanie could point out the obvious—that if he and Maureen occupied the room together that would also be two people taking advantage of the minuscule bathroom off her bedroom.
Brandon squatted on a huge squishy gift and bounced on top of it. My not-so-secret present from my mom, I guessed. Apparently tired of assessing the packages and listening to adults bicker, Brandon launched up and banged out the front door.
Beanie’s muscular frame twisted toward Teddy. “How’s Doreen?”
Teddy turned his flushed, thin face toward Beanie’s bulldoggish one. “Fine.”
“Who’s Doreen?” Maureen asked.
Uncle Beanie smiled faintly. “His wife.”
Uncle Teddy scowled at Beanie, but quickly swiveled back to Maureen, adding with an aggrieved uptick, “Who found something better to do than be with her family at Christmas.”
Maureen rested a hand on Teddy’s shoulder. From my vantage point nearby on the floor, I saw Teddy’s dress shirt crease, as though she’d added a little squeeze. “I’m sure she has a good reason.” Maureen’s voice hinted of Georgia.
“She does,” Beanie said sharply. “Doreen’s mother is ill.”
“Maureen doesn’t need a blow-by-blow account of my life,” Teddy retorted.
Maureen smiled as though happy to have two men fussing over her. Nikos and I stayed quiet on the sidelines, watching the interplay, but Anna rose abruptly, lifting her purse from the floor. She fished out a package of cigarettes and showed it to all of us. “Excuse me.” She slid to the door, lifting her coat from a hallway peg.
We all watched the long hair flip up over a furry collar. Cold air puffed into the room. After Anna closed the front door, silence reigned for a few seconds.
“How’s business?” Beanie boomed at Teddy.
Ouch. Teddy had never been good at any business.
“Fine.” Teddy angled his body more toward Maureen. “Just got my real estate license,” he said to her. “What do you do?”
“Her last husband was rich. She lives on alimony,” Uncle Beanie said. “She doesn’t do anything.”
Ouch. Ouch. I glanced in sympathy at Maureen, but the woman just smiled tightly.
I didn’t consider myself sensitive, and I had taken an immediate disliking to this woman, but Uncle Beanie’s words seemed harsh, even for him. Was he trying to drive Maureen into Teddy’s arms? Or was he up to something sneakier, preemptively devaluing her as a prize in case Teddy actually got lucky? Maybe that would explain why he’d suggested my mom move Maureen to the master bedroom rather than leave her in my room across from where he’d be sleeping. Or maybe the comment had been a dig at the way Doreen, Teddy’s wife, acted as chief breadwinner for Teddy’s family.
I’d known my mom’s brothers my entire life, and I still couldn’t decipher all the currents zapping between the two.
My mom poked her head into the room. “Drinks, anyone?”
We rose in unison, trooped into the kitchen, and made it through Christmas Eve with the help of a lot of eggnog.
TWO
Uncle Beanie stayed up the latest—drinking, the kitchen light making it impossible for me to fall asleep on the couch. My mom, snoring lightly on a futon in front of the fireplace, suffered no such problem.
Finally, Beanie turned off the light and padded down the hallway in the dark. If my ears gauged right, he stopped to drum his fingers on the door of Nikos and Anna’s room. I chalked that up to steadying his drunken body, or maybe he’d forgotten that he’d lost the argument about where Maureen would be lodging.
I tossed around on the squishy couch, finally giving up and lying on my back, my feet on the armrest. I tried to coax myself to sleep by mentally listing as many poisons as I could, starting with the classics like arsenic. I’d reached strychnine, when the front door squeaked.
I jolted, then remembered I was in Ferndale. My mom had never been one to lock the door, and obviously wouldn’t now, with company camping in the driveway. I expected my cousin Brandon to sneak past my mom and me and slip into the kitchen for a midnight snack.
Instead, footsteps started down the hall. I propped myself to see the shadowy figure.
Teddy?
Even though the RV had its own toilet, I supposed he might prefer the comfort of a real commode. But he didn’t enter the bathroom. He continued down the hall and rapped gently on Maurine’s door.
Hoo boy. Good thing my mom slept soundly. She would not have appreciated knowing her home had turned into a regular Peyton Place.
Angry whispers ensued, which included the word “crazy,” stretched like taffy to three syllables.
Teddy slunk back down the hall. His robe shimmered, a satiny fabric, as if he envisioned himself as a Hugh Hefner. He stopped to use the bathroom,
whether from necessity or a desire to create a cover, who knew.
My mom rose at the crack of dawn, banging the frying pan onto the stove and starting a pot of coffee. Brandon showed up next, whispering about presents. The aroma of coffee lured others into the kitchen. But Beanie didn’t appear—no big surprise.
While we waited for Beanie, I stretched on my stomach in front of the fire in my plaid flannel jammies. Consumed by my murder mystery addiction, I perused my tattered reference book on poisons and then switched to my new Sue Grafton mystery. “Bent since birth,” mom liked to say. Apparently even as a child I’d liked to explore under rocks.
The normal people were hanging out in the kitchen, draining the first pot of coffee and trading sections of the Eureka newspaper.
I peeked at the “family” tableau. Maureen leaned against the counter. While my mane tangled down my back, her gold hair was perfectly coifed, and at ten in the morning, she wore full make up, a green dress, and green heels. I lifted my brows in begrudging awe.
When Teddy tried to take up a spot next to Maureen, she edged away. It seemed clear to me that she’d been using Teddy only to needle Beanie, but Teddy could be annoyingly thick.
Anna hunched at the table, staring down at the newspaper without seeming to read. She appeared tired. Nikos put down his newspaper section and snaked a hand over to cover hers. She sighed and glanced at her watch.
“Would anyone like some eggs?” my mom asked.
Everyone declined.
After about the sixth time Brandon inquired in a mournful tone when we were going to open the presents, my mom marched toward Beanie’s room, a room that had once belonged to my brother Donald.
When my mom returned, she nudged me in the ribs where I lay by the fireplace, her wrinkled face revealing nothing. She could have been inspecting her knitted slipper with which she’d poked me.
“Carol, he’s done it,” she said cryptically.
Something was wrong. I pushed up from my comfy spot and followed my mom across the carpet. She stopped in the entrance to the hallway, as though reconsidering her actions.
Since we looked purposeful, Maureen joined us, or maybe without Beanie around to witness Teddy’s attentions, she wanted to escape them. The guy had spent the morning invading her personal space, hovering around her shoulder like a gnat.
“Is something wrong?” Maureen asked. The timber of her question twirled out and lassoed the others from the kitchen. Teddy, Nikos and Anna thronged behind her.
I felt like kicking Maureen in the pantyhose.
“What’s going on?” Brandon squeezed through and shot ahead of us down the hallway. My mom grabbed at him, but he strummed a riff on an air guitar, read our destination from our nervous glances, and popped into Donald’s room, aka the guest bedroom.
He jumped out in a second. “Whoa! Is Uncle Beanie dead?”
Teddy shoved forward. “Did he have a heart attack?” He didn’t suppress a certain eagerness in his voice.
We moved to the room, crowded around the metal-framed bed, and gawked at the bare, hairy chest. The broad expanse had been stripped of its sense of power. The blankets, twisted around Beanie’s legs, had tumbled toward the floor.
“It looks like he thrashed around some,” my mom noted in her stoic way.
Uncle Beanie’s business partner Nikos made the sign of the cross and backed away, as though, not a family member, he didn’t deserve a ringside spot. His wife Anna had not even entered the room. Their steps retreated down the hallway.
“You didn’t come in here last night?” Mom asked Maureen, with an eye to Brandon, who wiggled back into the room.
Brandon’s ears pricked like a bunny’s.
“Of course not,” Maureen said. “With all the commotion around here, I,” she drawled the word, “took me some Ambien. Out like a baby.”
Like a teething baby, perhaps. She’d seemed plenty awake when Teddy came a-callin’.
Even though my mom’s sleeping arrangements had landed me on the couch, I was glad she’d barred Maureen from Beanie’s sleeping quarters. While Beanie’s relationships with “girlfriends” tended to be mutually exploitative, they stirred an impulse in me to protect him. Beanie was more like a grandpa to me than an uncle.
Maureen reached out a handful of blooming red nails, painted with minuscule green trees, and pressed shut Beanie’s lids. To Maureen’s credit, her eyes were damp, which was more than I could say for the rest of us as we stood dumbly in the dim room.
Brandon bobbed beside the bed. “Does this mean we’re gonna’ be rich?”
“Brandon!” my mom said.
“Don’t get on the kid’s case,” Uncle Teddy snapped. He remained in the doorway as though he didn’t want to get too close to the body.
My mom opened her mouth, but couldn’t utter even a platitude. For years and years, she and Teddy had sided against their older brother Beanie, but one person’s death could shift a family dynamic like a tectonic fault.
“Everybody’s thinking about the money,” Uncle Teddy added.
“Speak for yourself.” I scowled at him although visions of dollar bills probably were dancing like sugarplums in the heads of everyone gathered. Uncle Beanie was a very wealthy man with no wife and no children.
Uncle Teddy tried to stare me down. I narrowed my eyes. Epic childhood confrontations with my mother had honed my stare-down skills to that of a cockatrice.
But I didn’t feel up for this contest. I glanced sadly at the pale corpse. It seemed unfair to view Uncle Beanie like this. I tugged the blankets up over his boxer shorts to his waist.
The sight of Uncle Beanie lying there dead filled me with sorrow. I had loved him because my mom said the same things about him that she said about me: “He got that red hair and temper from Grandpa Turner.” (Beanie’s hair, helped along now with Just for Men to a uniform silver, had once been no redder than mine, a shade of auburn.) “He’s stubborn as a bull.” (My mother said that about anyone she couldn’t control.) “He’s going to work himself to death.” (This, when she didn’t think he’d smoke, drink, or do-the-unmentionable to death.)
“Mom, he’s living to death,” I’d respond, although truth elbowed its way into her assertions. Like a true Type-A personality, Beanie put in seven-day weeks at his produce business, and on the side lived a life of unparalleled debauchery.
Even now the room smelled like cigars as though Beanie had completely flown in the face of my mom’s rule against smoking in the house. Of course, the odor could be embedded in his clothes or even oozing from his pores.
My mother pressed her lips together and then righteously pronounced, “Money is the root of all evil.”
“Well, I don’t think y’all have to worry.” Maureen smoothed the slinky green fabric over her hips. “Beanie went to the lawyer’s last month to make a codicil to his will.”
Our gazes turned toward her and she glowed as though she were the Virgin Mary herself. Behind her, Nikos scuttled to the doorway and peered around Teddy into the cramped room.
A change to his will—awfully damned coincidental, I thought.
I couldn’t stand everyone pressed into the room, talking about Beanie while he lay there dead and undignified. At least he had his dentures in. I tucked Beanie’s arm under my mother’s homemade quilt and yanked the blankets up farther, over his chest. As I did this, I noticed three things. First, his arm didn’t fully cooperate with getting under the cover. Rigor mortis had begun, indicating Uncle Beanie had died in the wee hours of the morning. Second, two red circles the size of golf balls splotched his underarm and his chest, right over his heart. Third, the tip of my right, big toe hit something under the bed.
My mom never stored anything under beds. She could be a packrat about yarns, but she had a rule: “If you have to put stuff under the bed, you have too much stuff.”
“There’ll have to be an autopsy,” I said to the group.
“Why?” Teddy yelped.
“There’s always an autopsy when
someone dies suddenly and hasn’t recently been to a doctor.” I tried to sound neutral, but when I talked to Teddy, my voice pitched toward antagonistic.
Maureen massaged her perfect nails with the ball of her thumb. “What makes you think he hasn’t been to a doctor?”
“Has he?” I asked.
“Day before yesterday,” she said.
“And?”
“A little hypertension. The doctor advised him to quit smoking.” She pointed at the nightstand. “See.” A package of Habitrol patches rested on the maple stand. “But the doctor warned him he should use caution, watch for adverse effects.”
A harrow raked through my guts. “I’m going to insist on an autopsy,” I said.
“Bless your tiny heart, why?” This time my mother, ramrod straight, across the bed from me.
“Because Uncle Beanie was murdered.”
“Murdered?” My mom actually shook her finger at me. “Carol, you’ve been reading too many of those books.”
“And who done it?” Teddy asked. “I suppose Santa slid down the chimney with a lethal dose.”
“How can it be murder?” Maureen said. “We were the only ones here last night.”
Exactly. I scanned the group.
Fortunately, Nikos’s wife Anna, after smoking a cigarette to calm down, had possessed the presence of mind to call 911. The arrival of the paramedics interrupted our lovely family vigil. We backed into the hall to let them get through.
Even though my mom offered flatly, “We’re sure he’s dead,” the two paramedics still charged into the room as if on a life-saving mission, one of them knocking stuff off the dresser with his kit. I witnessed first-hand why EMTs were the bane of crime labs everywhere.
But then our whole congregation had tromped through the bedroom. The crime scene had already been pretty thoroughly contaminated.
One of the paramedics waggled Uncle Beanie’s jaw, determined he was, indeed, very dead, and said he’d radio the Sheriff’s Office.
In addition to calling 911, Anna had brewed more coffee. As we trickled back to the living room, she handed out mugs. Her hands shook so badly the liquid threatened to slosh. A sudden death of someone close could unnerve anyone.