by Tamar Myers
“Ooh Abby,” C.J. said, “those aren’t just any palm trees; those are Windmill Palms. Trachycarpus fortunei. They’re native to southern China, Japan, and the Himalaya Mountains. But they seem to do just as well in the clay soil of the Carolina Piedmont as they do back home. Westfield Road, right off Selwyn Avenue here in Charlotte, is practically lined with them.”
“Well, I’ll be darned,” I said.
“Ladies,” Aaron said impatiently, “can we stop talking about gardening and get to the task.”
“Which is?” I said.
“We’re here to look for Jerry’s safe,” he said. “Remember? To prove to you that ring she was wearing the day she was murdered was a fake. Honestly, Mrs. Timberlake, I had you pegged for brighter than that.”
“You hold your brace of mules,” C.J. said, matching his impatience. “Abby might not be the ripest grape on the bunch, but she’s got an IQ of one twenty-five, which makes her totally adequate for just about any job—even President, as far as the Electoral College is concerned.”
“What?” I said. “How do you know my IQ score?”
“You told Wynnell and me once when you were drunk,” C.J. said.
“That just goes to show you that you should never trust a drunk woman,” I said.
“Amen to that,” Aaron said. “And Aunt Jerry was often in her cups.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Yes, well, she claims to have had a hard life, beginning with her childhood, but you don’t hear Chanti or Ben complaining about that.”
“I don’t mean to be argumentative,” I said, “but we all process things in different ways.”
He responded with a soft grunt. “Yes, her husband died. That was all very sad, but she didn’t stay a grieving widow for long. Oh no, not Jerry. She had a succession of failed love relationships. Sounds better than a parade of loser lovers, doesn’t it?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Mrs. Timberlake, my sister may have been as old as the hills, but her heels were just as rounded—ha ha, what do you call that sort of wordplay?”
“Confusing.”
“He means,” C.J. said, “that he had a slutty sister.”
“Ah, the big one is correct. And the men all seemed to be younger than her—some of them even extremely so. Now what does that make her in today’s lingo?” He tapped his chin, which set his head to bobbing like a metronome. “Yes, a lioness!”
“A cougar,” I said curtly. “It seems to run in the family.”
“Oh, you must be referring to Ben’s runaway wife in the Antipodes. Just so you know, she’s not related by blood; we’re Jewish, not Mennonites or Amish. We’re not that into marrying cousins, even if they are just second or third cousins.”
“Back to the boyfriends. Were any of them there at Ben’s house the day she was killed?”
He shrugged, and the poor man’s head practically became a blur. “Not that I could tell.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“It means,” he said, “that I didn’t go around peering behind each bush—hey, where’s that goofy friend of yours?”
“Look here, buster, I’ll not have you speaking like that about my friends—C.J., where are you?”
“She probably stepped out into in the garden,” Aaron said. “Can you blame her? Sorry about that. The comment, I mean. I guess I’m kinda quick to pick on other folks’ foibles, given that I’m—I’m, well, rather peculiar myself. Or so I’ve been told. Multiple times, in fact, by my near perfect wife, Melissa. She can’t for the life of her remember why it is she married me, and not one of my handsome relatives.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Tell her that your brother Ben is too old for her, your nephew Rob is gay, and Sam is, well—she definitely came out ahead. You were the cream of the Ovumkoph crop—now there’s a tongue twister for you.”
He beamed. “You really think that I am?”
“Yes, I do. But for your Melissa. I still pick Rob, because he’s my best friend.”
“Oh.”
I flashed him a charming smile. “Don’t be hurt, silly. Just tell me what we do next. Look in Jerry’s jewelry box?”
“That’s actually not a bad idea. Sometimes the obvious place is the answer.”
Chapter 18
I guess I expected someone like Jerry Ovumkoph to have shockingly pink bedroom walls, so I was a bit surprised to see the warm yet soothing terra-cotta finish. But dominating the master bedroom was a massive king-size bed, and I had to work not to picture Jerry in it dominating her string of loser lovers. Other than the bed, the furnishings were simple: just two matching mahogany nightstands with drawers. The walls were decorated with a couple of paintings reminiscent of Tuscany landscapes, although there was one small stretched canvas that was covered only with orange and red poppies. On a small table opposite the monstrous bed perched a wooden Celtic harp.
“Did she play this?” I asked.
“Surprisingly well,” Aaron said. “We all thought it was a phase at first, but I guess we should have known better. With Jerry, once something grabbed her imagination, it didn’t let go. By the way, ‘Greensleeves’ was her specialty.”
“I love that song,” I said. “You sister and I had a lot in common.” Then a wicked thought grabbed my imagination, which I couldn’t let go of.
“We even had the parade of loser lovers in common,” I said.
That stopped his head from bobbing for a nanosecond. “Are you a cougar as well, Mrs. Timberlake?”
“Grrrrrah! Practically jailbait, all of them,” I said. “But only practically, mind you—nothing illegal, I assure you.”
“But immoral,” he said.
“In whose eyes?” I asked. “The Bashilele tribe in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are polyandrous. At least they used to be in the 1950s. You should read The Witch Doctor’s Wife—”
“Mrs. Timberlake, are we here to discuss literature, or find out where my sister keeps the real gem, and maybe—with a lot of luck—run across a clue that will point to her killer.”
Unless it’s one of us, I thought. And I’m pretty sure it isn’t me. Really, what were we doing in Jerry Ovumkoph’s bedroom anyway? Leaving fingerprints so that I could be arrested and spend the rest of my life behind bars playing maidservant to an amazing hulk named Big Selma? Odds are she would be anything but goofy, and not have one tenth the smarts of C.J. And another thing, I’m four feet, nine inches; whichever way you choose to run the stripes, it doesn’t matter—they won’t look good on me.
“It’s a phenomenal book,” I said. “The author’s best.”
He walked ahead into a divinely large bathroom. “Ah, the jewelry box. Would you care to open it, Mrs. Timberlake?”
“I’ll pass, thank you,” I said.
“What? Why not?”
“I’m too nervous, that’s why.” At least that much was the truth.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Whether or not the stone is genuine is not dependent upon whoever opens the box. Go ahead; give the top drawer a gentle tug.”
“No. I’m feeling light-headed. I either need to sit on the edge of the tub, or go outside for a minute. You know what? I think I’ll just step outside. I’ll go join C.J.—wherever she is. Who knows what that goofy gal is up to.”
“Dang it, Mrs. Timberlake, I thought we were past that.” He grabbed a tissue from a faux marble box and used it to keep from leaving fingerprints. But although he opened every drawer—he even pulled them all the way out of the six-story box—we didn’t find the emerald ring. We didn’t even find any genuine jewels, other than a pair of commercial-grade ruby earrings, something undoubtedly meant as everyday wear by the deceased.
“I’ll check the closet,” I said, just as Aaron let loose with a string of invectives. Although I have reached a point in my life where mere words cannot offend me, I also feel that I have the right to protect my spirit from verbal garbage. Such vitriol does not just go in one ear and out the other—
not with doing damage. A little bit of one’s soul is worn away in the process, like sandstone in fast-flowing river.
I grew up in the house of a woman who I believed to be the South’s most eccentric female. Yet, after only five minutes in Jerry Ovumkoph’s spacious closet, I was ready to strip Mama of her title. It is my firm conviction that if I’d been shown Jerry’s closet without any backstory, and been asked the following multiple-choice question, I might have given any of the three answers below.
Question: To what use is this space being put?
Answer A: Storage room for a clown school.
Answer B: Closet for a seventy-five-year-old lady.
Answer C: Overflow storage for a fabric store run by very messy clerks.
There were a few conventional pieces of clothing—Western-style, that is. Apparently Rob’s Aunt Jerry was a great fan of Indian saris, which as a rule contain many yards of cloth. But these saris seemed to have staged a rebellion, and at least half of them had somehow managed to slip off their hangers to become jumbled with matching shoes. Now they were fighting it out in a death match over floor space.
It soon became apparent that the only way to effectively search the room (a closet this large could almost be a midsize room) was to pull everything out. For the time being, the nearby garden tub was as convenient a place as any to dump things, and that I did—willy-nilly.
“Mrs. Timberlake! Mrs. Timberlake, what are you doing?”
“Clearing out a few things,” I said grumpily. I was no longer focused. Surely we were wasting our time sorting through this mess.
“Hey, that’s my sister’s stuff you’re throwing around. Be more careful, will you?”
“Sorry,” I said, “but I have this feeling.”
He must have picked up on my mood. “Feeling?” he snapped. “What kind of feeling?”
“Call it a hunch,” I said. “Woman’s intuition. There’s something back here under all this stuff—maybe a safe or something.”
It was true, I did have a hunch, a very strong one in fact, but it had just come over me that second, even as I was telling Aaron about it.
“I don’t mean to rain on your parade, Mrs. Timberlake,” he said, “but I don’t put too much truck in a hunch. At least not enough to mess with my sister’s things like this.”
“Mr. Ovumkoph, your sister’s things are a mess, and as for my hunch, my friend Magdalena Yoder, up in Pennsylvania, says that a hunch from a woman is worth two facts from a man.”
He reared back, no doubt surprised by the strength of my emotion. “Somehow I doubt that, Mrs. Timberlake.”
I pulled aside a pile of assorted brightly colored silks. “Hunch verified,” I said, taking care to keep any trace of smugness out of my voice. Attitude was not going to take me where I wanted to go.
“What?” he barked. “Let me see?”
I plopped my petite patootie right in front of the heavy metal box. “On the other hand,” I said, “maybe we shouldn’t be pawing through a dead woman’s things.”
“Move,” he growled.
I scooted aside so that he could see the small safe that was bolted to the floor. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Any chance that you might know the combination?” I said.
“No need; the door isn’t even closed all the way.” He swung it open and I scooted back in to get a close-up view.
Jerry Ovumkoph had a collection of jewels guaranteed to make a duchess drool. There were two compartments in the safe: the top section was devoted to diamonds and gold set with diamonds; the bottom level contained pieces decorated with colored stones, such as sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and aquamarines. However, a cursory glance revealed that it did not contain a ring set with a monstrous emerald of the highest quality.
“Now what?” Aaron said. There was accusation in his voice.
“My hunch was that we’d find a safe somewhere in this jumble,” I said. “I didn’t claim that we’d find a smoking gun—so to speak.”
He kicked at a pile of bras and underclothes at the other side of the closet. “Ow! Damn it!”
“What is it?”
He shoved aside the delicate underthings. Victoria had no secrets that evening.
“Another safe.” He knelt.
“Let me see,” I said breathlessly, “let me see.”
He snorted. “Bit of a hypocrite, aren’t you?”
“Well, the damage to our karma is already done. Now it’s your turn to scoot.”
“Cheese and crackers, but you’re a bossy one. I bet Mr. Timberlake gets tired of you right quick.”
“You’ve got that right; Buford generally can’t stand me. Now scooch!”
But there wasn’t much to see; just more of the same. Except that this safe had a couple of fabulous pieces of royal jade in it, plus a tsavorite garnet and diamond necklace that made me request a moment of silence so that I could seriously review my morals. Aaron Ovumkoph seemed like the kind of guy that could easily be talked into abandoning his morals. No one needed to know that we’d discovered the pair of safes, not even the mysteriously truant C.J.
“But we can’t,” he said out of the blue.
“What?”
“You know—what you’re thinking.”
“How do you know what I’m thinking? Maybe I’m thinking about what I had for breakfast.”
“It wouldn’t be right, and it’s against my religion. I’m surprised it’s not against yours.”
My face burned. “Who says that it isn’t—assuming you’re even correct. Which, by the way, I most sincerely doubt.”
“Now we add lying to the list.”
“List? There is no list!”
“Of course if we did, I’d be the one to do the dividing, since you obviously can’t be trusted.”
I took a deep, cleansing breath. I swear that it was this extra second that allowed my eyes to settle on what looked to be a diamond pendant suspended from the green garnet necklace. However, at this angle light was passing through one of the planes, rather than being reflected back at me, which could mean only one thing: the magnificent diamond was actually a cubic zirconia. Braving the wrath of Aaron I picked up the entire necklace.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he demanded. “You put that back.”
“Gladly,” I said. “But first come have a look-see in the vanity light. This necklace isn’t real.”
“Yes, it is. I remember my sister wearing that with a green silk—whatchamacallit—”
“Sari?” I said.
“Yeah. Anyway,” he said, “she wore it at the Purim Ball just last year, and you should have heard all the ladies complimenting her.”
“As well they should have,” I said, “because it is very beautiful; there is no denying that. However, I’m afraid that these stones are all cubic zirconia—even the large diamond.”
“Bullhockey!” he shouted. “You’ll say anything to get your hands on this stuff.”
“Here, take this,” I said. “I bet everything else in both safes comes under the category of replacement jewelry. Either Jerry had the real stuff stored somewhere else, and kept this just to remind her what she had, or else—well, she had this stuff made up because she was forced to sell the real jewelry.”
When a bobble-headed man flies into a rage, it is wise to plan an escape route. Not being entirely foolish, I stepped slowly to my right, so that I was directly in line with the bedroom door.
“If she was that desperate, Mrs. Timberlake,” he said through lips that were drained of blood, “how could she possibly leave millions of dollars to anyone in her will?”
I put one foot solidly behind me, ready to take off. “We don’t know for sure that she did, do we?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded.
“Did you actually read the will?” I said.
The dome of his head was as white and shiny as a freshly peeled boiled egg. “Hold your horses there, little lady. Are you accusing my sister of making that all up? Of staging th
at will ceremony just for show?”
“I’m saying that it’s possible,” I said, as I made my escape into the master bedroom. “C.J.? Where are you, C.J.?”
Chapter 19
But confound it, my gal pal could not be found. I even jogged all about the town home neighborhood, calling her name as loudly as I dared, but without the desired results. In fact, my only response at all came from one irate woman, fairly tall and with strawberry blond hair, who came running out of her house and demanded that I hush up at once or she was calling the police. This old crone claimed to be a successful writer, which I highly doubt, because if she were, she probably would have sent an assistant out instead.
At any rate, since life is not a science fiction movie, and there were enough Southern Baptists whizzing up and down Rea Road to let me know that the Rapture had not taken place, I concluded that C.J. had left the neighborhood and not simply disappeared. Perhaps she’d gotten bored and hoofed it—she is a country gal, after all—or maybe she’d called a cab—the woman claims to have dined at Buckingham Palace, so she’s not a complete rube.
Having satisfied myself that there was nothing amiss, I decided to call it a day. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to play anymore, and I don’t mean “play” in the fun sense. There are times when the wise thing to do is to pull up one’s metaphorical drawbridges (in my case, the literal covers), TV remote in hand, and not answer the phone, or venture out of one’s safe place, until one has been well rested. Of course lots of variables come into this mix: such as chocolate, purring cats, and sometimes warm-bodied snuggly-buggly husbands—unless they’re the problem.
When I returned to the hotel I was loaded down with chocolate, and in lieu of my cat I had gossip magazines. I fully expected to find Greg in the room watching a detective show while practically tearing out his precious hair at all the gaffes in the writing. Greg is a vociferous critic of any TV show he watches, but crime shows in particular are the catalysts for these outbursts.
But when I opened the door it was the sound of the phone that assaulted my ears, not the swearing of my sweet hubby. And since the no-phone rule begins only after one has first checked in with principal loved ones regarding their safety (their happiness on drawbridge days is immaterial), I was compelled to answer it. Quite possible my minimadre had gotten her tiny self into trouble between the Texas Roadhouse and the hotel, as they were not attached. Even then, any long hallway poses problems for Mozella Wiggins, who has a nose for trouble and can sniff it out anywhere.