by Edie Claire
“Please do tell me what this is about, Officer Wright,” Frances demanded as soon as the four of them were out of earshot of any wandering guests.
The policeman, who appeared no more than twenty-five or so, seemed somewhat embarrassed. “I’m sorry to distress you, ma’am. I’m sure this is all nothing to worry about. But we’ve had a 911 call in regards to this location, and we have to check these things out as a matter of policy, you understand. You’re hosting some sort of party here?”
Olympia could not control herself. Seemingly in disbelief that anyone could be unaware of the importance of the Holiday House Tour, she informed the young gentleman of the nature of the event in her usual superior tone, including several whoppers detailing the involvement of local celebrities and sports heroes.
The young officer did not seem impressed. He turned back to Frances. “If this is a commercial venture, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to shut it down, at least temporarily.”
“Shut it down?” Frances and Olympia both screeched.
“A 911 call about what?” Leigh asked.
The officer shuffled his feet. “Well, now. I’m sure it’s all just a hoax, ladies. The dispatcher seemed to think the voice was muffled on purpose and when the chief heard it he said the same thing — that it was almost certainly some kids or maybe an upset neighbor trying to make trouble. But we have to check these things out, just the same.”
“Check out what?” Frances demanded.
“An anonymous caller gave emergency services this address,” the officer answered finally. “They said we’d better clear this house out quick, because inside it was ‘snowing anthrax.’”
No one said anything for a moment. They all seemed to be digesting the absurdity.
Finally, Leigh released a pent-up breath. “Anthrax!” she repeated, practically cheerful with relief. He could have said so many worse things. So many more plausible things! “Well, of course it’s a hoax! Good grief, where would anybody get anthrax? Who even talks about it anymore? That’s crazy!”
“I got you, ma’am, believe me,” the officer agreed. “And the way it was stated, it wasn’t framed as a threat — it came off more like a concerned citizen report, if you know what I mean. But still, I do have to ask the homeowner a few questions.”
“Of course! I understand.” Leigh turned to her mother. But the homeowner had gone deadly pale. “Mom?” she asked anxiously. “Mom? Are you okay?”
Frances made no response.
“Anthrax…” Olympia murmured in a low, wispy tone. Her normally florid complexion had gone as pale as Frances’s.
Holy crap. What was wrong with the two of them?
“But this is nothing!” Leigh insisted. “It’s nonsense! Just some jerk pulling a prank! ‘Snowing anthrax?’ Give me a break! There’s nothing whatsoever to worry about!”
The women turned even paler.
Olympia snaked out a hand and clutched Frances’s arm in another pincer grip. “Without treatment, the inhalation form of anthrax is 90% fatal,” she muttered tonelessly.
“What?” Leigh cried, baffled. “No! This isn’t—”
“I knew I shouldn’t do it,” Frances mumbled, her voice sounding equally lifeless. She appeared not to notice that the Floribunda president was cutting off the circulation in her arm, much less pay any attention to what Olympia was saying. “I knew it was too much to ask. But I wanted this so badly…”
“Mom!” Leigh said loudly, peeling off Olympia’s claw. “Mom, what are you talking about? Everything is fine. The tour has been fabulous!”
Frances’s eyes focused on Leigh, but the look in them was sheer mania. “That’s the way it always seems at the beginning. But then everything goes wrong, and people get sick, and it’s all my fault!” Her last words turned into a choking cry as she turned from Leigh and raced toward the front of the house.
“Ma’am!” the officer called, sounding baffled. “Ma’am? I just need to ask you a few—”
“Come on!” Olympia cried, grabbing at Leigh’s arm now. “We’ve got to stop them!”
“Stop who? From what?” Leigh demanded as she pushed Olympia’s hands away and dashed after her mother. “Mom, will you stop? Calm down!”
Frances slammed her hands down on the card table on the porch. “We’re closing early,” she told the regionals. “It’s for public safety, but don’t tell them that. Tell them… tell them the house is on fire!”
“Mom!” Leigh protested, but hurricane Frances was gone already. She blew past the confused regionals through the front door and headed straight for the kitchen as Leigh followed.
“Get rid of the food!” Frances yelled to Lydie. She hoisted up the punch bowl and swung it toward the sink. “Throw it away! All of it!”
“Frances!” Lydie exclaimed. “Whatever has gotten into—”
“Just do it!” Frances ordered, dumping the entire contents of the punchbowl down the drain.
“Mom,” Leigh tried again, lowering her voice. “Remember your blood pressure. You’ve got to calm down.”
Frances set the empty bowl on the counter and whirled to face her. “I will not calm down when people are being poisoned under my roof!”
“Who’s being poisoned?” Lydie demanded.
“Nobody!” Leigh answered.
“You don’t know that!” Frances screeched.
“Frances,” Lydie said calmly, “why on earth would anybody try to poison anybody?”
“Ask him!” Frances wailed, pointing to the police officer, who stood blinking in the kitchen doorway, looking as confused as everyone else. “I don’t know, but I can’t let it happen all over again. I just can’t. I never should have taken the chance!”
“It was the Flying Maples!” Virginia screamed as she appeared behind the policeman. “I told you they were out for revenge! And they put something in the punch? Oh, Lord have mercy! I knew I didn’t feel well! We’re all going to die!”
“Nobody is going to die!” Leigh said firmly. “There was nothing in the punch!”
“Keep your trap shut, Virginia!” her husband Harry chastised. “There’s people upstairs, still!”
“Who died?” Anna Marie yelled at full volume from the top of the steps.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Leigh heard Harry say as he peeled off from the group and pounded up the steps. “I’ll take care of it!”
Leigh’s attention remained focused on her mother. Frances was in full freak-out mode, and Olympia was freaking out right along with her.
“Was it in the punch or in the cookies?” Olympia demanded, looking at the police officer.
The poor man appeared completely overwhelmed.
Virginia pushed her way forward. “Maybe it was neither! Maybe there was poison on the decorations! I told you it was a trick! Those Flying Maples want us dead! All of us!”
“Who are the Flying Maples?” the policeman demanded, rediscovering his voice at last.
“Their imaginary enemy,” Leigh assured him, still trying to keep her voice calm, even as she contemplated stuffing a whole Christmas tree cookie into Virginia’s gaping mouth. Frances looked terrible. She was pale as a ghost and breathing heavily. Even by “Frances standards” of nutty behavior, this panic rated as an overreaction. And what was Olympia’s excuse?
Leigh looked over to see Melvin making his way to his wife’s side. “Olympia, dear,” he said softly. “You cannot afford to upset yourself like this. Come out to the living room and—”
“Oh, do hush up!” Olympia snapped. “Did you not hear what the man said? He said we’d all been poisoned with anthrax, Melvin. ANTHRAX!”
“No, I did not say that!” the officer insisted, whipping his hat off in frustration. A sheen of sweat had broken out across the frontier of his prematurely receding hairline, and his complexion was flushed. “All I said was that we had a citizen report of a possible danger here. In the department’s judgment, it was almost certainly a prank call, but regardless, our job is to—”
“You see!” Olympia crowed.
They all heard Harry’s voice echoing loudly down the stairs, followed by multiple footsteps. “Terribly sorry about this… medical emergency… family member… hopefully nothing serious…”
The crowd seemed to collectively hold their breath as Virginia’s husband led the remaining guests down the stairs, through the living room, and back out the front door. “Yes, right out this way… Merry Christmas, to you, too… You enjoy the rest of the tour, now!” A door slammed shut, and everyone breathed out again.
Thank goodness none of them had to see this, Leigh thought to herself, proud to have one positive thought in the midst of utter inanity. Frances had moved from the counter and was scrambling around the kitchen trying to dump the rest of the food into the trash can while Lydie tried to rescue it. Olympia was shoving off her husband while he attempted to put a cuff on her arm, and Virginia was essentially spinning around with her hands in the air. All of which proved very distracting for the unfortunate police officer, whose goal of getting Frances’s attention long enough to answer his questions still eluded him.
“If it was in the box of decorations, we could get the inhalation or the cutaneous form!” Olympia moaned to no one in particular. “The skin type isn’t as deadly, but those horrible black spots… Oh, dear!”
“Who died?” Anna Marie demanded again, pushing into the kitchen.
“It’s anthrax!” Virginia shouted.
Delores and Jennie Ruth, who were now listening from outside the doorway, screamed in horror.
Leigh had had enough. “STOP THIS!” she yelled louder. “There is no anthrax! No one has died! And no one has been poisoned. This is all a FALSE ALARM!”
The house went quiet for a moment. Virginia stopped spinning and took a step closer to Leigh. “How do you know that?” she accused.
“Because there isn’t one shred of evidence to show that anything has actually gone wrong here!” Leigh pointed out. “The only thing that’s happened is people misunderstanding what they’ve heard and jumping to conclusions!”
“Thank you!” the officer agreed, replacing his hat with authority. Leigh felt another wave of sympathy for the man. No doubt the police academy had prepared him well for stealthy burglars and brawling streetfighters, but a gaggle of hysterical Floribundas likely fell outside the basic curriculum.
“I need everyone to stay calm,” he said forcefully. Then he turned to Frances. “Ms. Koslow, do you have any reason to believe that anyone in particular has any reason to threaten you or your household with bodily harm of any kind?”
Frances straightened a bit. She was still holding an empty cookie tray over the trashcan. She looked back at the officer, then at everyone who was clustered around staring at her. A tinge of red returned to her cheeks, and Leigh began to relax a little. All of a sudden Frances looked more embarrassed than frightened. When at last she answered, her voice was slow and thoughtful. “No, I suppose not. Not… bodily harm.” Then her eyes flashed fire. “But an attempt to disrupt this happy event? Absolutely!”
“Hear, hear!” Virginia agreed.
“Oh, no,” Delores’s small voice purred. Leigh was surprised to see the diminutive woman standing right next to Virginia, considering that she must have elbowed her way through half a dozen people to get there. “I’m sure the Flying Maples would never do anything like that. I believe they are all really good and wonderful people inside, no matter how horrible and vicious they may act.” She smiled and batted her long gray eyelashes with innocence.
When Leigh was a child, she used to think that Delores was sweet. As an adult, she found her pretty damned scary.
The policeman turned to Leigh. “Will someone please tell me who the Flying Maples are?”
Leigh opened her mouth to answer, but Virginia beat her to it. “They’re the garden club chapter that were supposed to have their house on the tour tonight. But they had black mold, so we got their spot. And now they can’t stand that everyone who’s anyone in Pittsburgh has seen this house and knows that the Floribundas are the original and legitimate garden club chapter of the West View area!”
A smattering of applause broke out as Frances, Olympia, Anna Marie, Delores, and Jennie Ruth all signaled their approval of Virginia’s statement. Lydie and Harry merely stared at them.
The officer stared at them too. Then he turned to Leigh. “Are they serious?”
Leigh nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
The officer sighed and pulled a notebook from his breast pocket.
The gesture gave Leigh a sudden twinge of panic. Where was Allison? The child was never far away when disturbing things happened. Leigh looked in the most likely place — right behind her elbow — but her daughter wasn’t there.
Seeing that Lydie had managed to get Frances to sit down at the table with the officer, Leigh pushed her way out of the crowded kitchen. She was relieved to catch sight of Allison in the living room, standing with her cousin Lenna by the Christmas tree.
“Thank goodness,” Leigh gushed, rushing up to them both. “Are you two okay?”
Allison frowned. “Why wouldn’t we be, Mom? You just said it was a false alarm.”
Leigh was spared the indignity of answering by her hypochondriac of a niece.
“I’ve had a stomach ache all afternoon!” Lenna whined, tears just starting to pool in her pretty baby-blue eyes. “What exactly is anthrax?”
“Something cows get in Africa!” Allison said with exasperation. “I already told you, you just drank too much punch!”
“But she’s sick, too!” Lenna argued, pointing.
Leigh looked up to see Jennie Ruth shuffling across the living room, holding her stomach. At gatherings of the Floribundas, Jennie Ruth was the easiest to overlook, because she almost never said anything. Yet she was invariably present, very much like a bump on a log. In fact, Jennie Ruth was like a log in a lot of ways. She was wide, heavy, dull, and seemingly devoid of content. The only actions Leigh could ever remember Jennie Ruth taking at past Floribunda meetings in the Koslow home were to belch, complain that the food was gone, and insist on planting more tulips.
Jennie Ruth reached the couch, sat down with a plop, and curled up on her side.
Oh, no.
“Jennie Ruth!” Leigh cried, hurrying up to her. “Are you feeling all right?”
The least objectionable of the Floribundas opened her eyes and looked up with a dazed, slightly annoyed expression. Then she belched.
“We’ll be leaving now,” called an irritated voice from the front door. Leigh whirled to see the regional representatives, binders and boxes in hand. “Your mother and your president appear to be ‘otherwise engaged’ at the moment, but all the checked-in guests have now cleared this stop, so your portion of the tour is over. You may tell them that we’re not at all pleased at whatever has caused this undignified chaos and we shall discuss it in much more detail at a later time. At the moment, however, we’re cold.” Both women tugged their coats more snugly around them. “It’s been a long day and we’re going home. Good night.”
“Good night,” Leigh said pleasantly.
There really was nothing else to say.
Lucille’s personal assistant Bridget popped out of the dining room and scurried up to Leigh. “What’s happening?” she asked, looking down at Jennie Ruth. “Is she sick?”
Leigh honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. Was hypochondria a sickness? She looked over Bridget’s shoulder into the dining room and saw that Lucille’s chin was planted in her chest. Now that Leigh thought about it, one cranky voice had been missing from the mayhem. “Is Lucille all right?” she asked.
“Oh, she’s fine,” Bridget replied, waving a hand dismissively. “She nodded off a while ago. And a good thing, too! With all this excitement…” She stepped closer to Leigh and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Because she’s not really fine, you know. Miss Lucille’s much worse off than she wants anyone to know. Even if she does talk about dying all the t
ime.”
Leigh lifted a questioning eyebrow at the unrequested flow of information, but Bridget’s lips flapped on. “She’s got congestive heart failure. She was a smoker from way back. And her kidneys are shot, too. Did you know she has a DNR? That means ‘do not resuscitate.’ Says she’s ready to go and she doesn’t want any fancy-pants doctors young enough to be her grandkids keeping her alive just to boost their own egos. But she’s bad. Really bad. She drops off to sleep like that all the time now. Sometimes at night she’ll get where she can’t hardly breathe. Her lungs are like wet cotton. Why, just last week—”
Leigh was spared further medical details by another knock at the door. Out the window she could see a pizza delivery man holding a stack five pies high. “Excuse me,” she said, moving towards the door. But before she could open it Olympia rushed into the room, her shorter, rounder husband hot on her heels.
“Stop!” the president called out to Leigh, palm raised. “We cannot bring any more food into this house until we know exactly what is going on!”
“Olympia, precious,” Melvin begged. “Would you let me handle this? You need to sit down a minute. Have you been keeping yourself hydrated?”
Olympia turned on her husband as if he were a biting fly, all pretense of marital harmony forgotten. “Oh, go drink prune juice, you nagging little fool!”
Under other circumstances, Leigh would have been amused to hear that particular line flung at a proctologist. But she was not in a laughing mood.
“The food will stay on the porch!” Olympia continued to rant. “Until the police are certain this was a false alarm.”
Melvin did not give up. “All right, all right, dear,” he said soothingly, pulling out his wallet. “I’ll pay for the food and just set it down outside. I promise. Now you go back into the kitchen and sit down, all right?”
“Leigh,” Olympia ordered, ignoring her husband. “Does your mother have a computer? I need to look up first aid for biological warfare! Quickly!”
“All of the electronics are hidden away,” Leigh answered. Behind Olympia in the dining room, she could see that Lucille had begun to slump in a rather uncomfortable-looking manner. She glanced around for Bridget.