Murder On the Mississippi Queen

  Murder On The Mississippi Queen

  The Doreen Sizemore Adventures Book 4

  Serena B Miller

  Contents

  Main Body

  Also by Serena B Miller

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Serena B Miller

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published By L J Emory Publishing

  ISBN: 978-1-940283-16-6

  Murder On The Mississippi Queen

  * * *

  Cousins can get a body into a whole peck of trouble if you let ‘em, and that Lula Faye went and got me into an awful mess. I wish I’d never laid eyes on the woman. It’s true. Even if we did grow up together and share the same bed as kids more times as not.

  My name is Doreen Sizemore and I turned seventy-two years old last month. Kinda hard to believe, but there it is. I remember my mama when she turned seventy standing in front of a mirror and saying, “What is this sixteen-year-old girl a’doin in that old woman’s body.”

  I thought it was sort of funny at the time. Now I don’t. That’s just how I feel sometimes if I don’t do something quick to take my mind off my own self.

  Now what was it I was fixing to tell?

  Oh yes, Lula Faye and the mess she got me into. That woman don’t have the brains of a goose.

  The biggest problem with me is I have trouble saying “no” to people who need me, especially if they’re kin. My mama taught me that rule. She said a person has to help kinfolks no matter what. Then there’s all that guilt-producing Sunday preaching I’ve heard my whole life about helping others.

  This is a little hard to explain, so I’ll begin at the beginning and work my way up to explaining why this God-fearing, Sunday-School-going, senior citizen ended up sitting here in this little jail cell in Natchez, Mississippi, when I should have been watching my soaps at home with my feet propped up sipping a nice glass of sweet tea and waiting for my soup beans to finish simmering on the stove for dinner.

  Matter-of-fact, I’d like me some soup beans right now, with a nice hunk of ham bone in ‘em and a crumbly piece of buttery cornbread with honey drizzled over it. Jail food ain’t all that good which probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to nobody.

  Now what was I talking about? Oh yes, how I ended up in jail. I’m sorry, but I’m just a little rattled. I keep thinking about what people back home in South Shore, Kentucky are going to think about me becoming a jail bird? I’ll probably never live it down.

  There’s been times in the past when I looked at my little house in South Shore and I’d think about how I’d kinda like me a new house. Maybe one where the roof was straight across instead of sagging in the middle. Sometimes I’ve looked at my house and thought maybe I oughta paint it a different color or have the porch replaced or I’d wish that I could afford me some new furniture. There’ve been times when I’d look at my old Frigidaire and think it might be nice to have a new one that didn’t make so much noise, or wish I had me one of them automatic dish washers instead of having to wash up everything my own self by hand.

  I’m not thinking that way now, though. I’m so homesick for that little house of mine I don’t think I’ll ever want another thing if I can just get back there. A jail cell ain’t no place for a seventy-two-year-old Kentucky woman who ain’t never done nothing she were all that ashamed of.

  If it weren’t for Lula Faye’s carrying’s on, that’s where I’d be right now. Back home without a worry in the world.

  Instead, here’s what happened.

  I got a lot of cousins on the Sizemore side of the family. That’s because my daddy’s people tend to be a breedin’ bunch. I have found this branch of cousins to be a mixed bag of blessings. Some are as close to me as a brother or sister and I want them to be because they’re just naturally good people.

  Some of my cousins are as rotten as old potatoes—the kind you find stinking up the pantry when you go sniffing around trying to figure out what smells so bad. I stay away from ‘em if I can. They will either eat you out of house and home or be all nicey-nice and kissy-face when they come to visit. Then just when you’re feeling all warm and toasty from the visit and said your good-byes, you find out something’s gone missing--like that pretty silver sugar spoon of my mama’s that Cecelia slipped into her panty hose last time she come asking me for money, or that hunting rifle of Daddy’s that Jimmy Beam Sizemore stole after asking to use the indoor toilet. (I thought he was walking awful stiff-legged when he came back out into the living room!)

  There’s a whole mess of Sizemore relatives I barely know way out in Salt Lake City, Utah, too. They ended up out there when my great-grandpa’s oldest brother up and decided to move way out west. The rumor is that he left a girl pregnant back here he didn’t want to marry but I can’t prove it and its ancient history anyway. I’ve only seen them Utah cousins a couple of times when they come around asking questions about our family. Them people do seem plumb starved for genealogical information and I don’t know why.

  I got distant cousins in Congress, cousins who are priests in the Mormon Tabernacle, and cousins who are cooling their heels in the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution.

  And then there’s Lula Faye Hall.

  I hardly know what to say about Lula Faye. The woman defies description, but I’ll try.

  Here’s the thing. Lula Faye’s the best Baptist I’ve ever known. That woman plays the organ at her church and about half the time she’s nodding at the choir, leading it by bobbing her head with the music at the same time. She teaches Sunday school, Vacation Bible School, Children’s Church, is in charge of two visitation committees (one for the physically ill, and one for the wayward sinners) and she volunteers part-time as a church secretary whenever Marva, the real church secretary, gets sick.

  Marva told me once that it ain’t smart for her to get sick very often. She’s afraid that if she’s out of the office for any length of time, Lula Faye will talk the deacons into giving her the job.

  Lula Faye is like that. She can talk people into doing just about anything. It ain’t that she’s hard-hearted. She’s not. It’s just that she thinks she knows what’s best for everybody and believes that her opinions are the exact same ones as the Lord’s.

  I heard a preacher say once that Lula Faye was often wrong but never uncertain. That described her real good, but that preacher didn’t last long at that church.

  She’s the kind of woman who is always going on about the Lord telling her things. For instance, last summer she said the Lord had told her that I should make ten dozen cookies for her church’s Vacation Bible School that year. I told her that was right odd because the Lord hadn’t said anything to me about baking no ten dozen cookies for her church’s VBS.

  Of course, I made the cookies for her anyway but she didn’t have to bring the Lord into it to get me to do it. Like I said, I was taught to help people out and I’m pretty certain He has bigger issues to deal with than whether or not I bake Lula Faye some cookies.

  Basically, Lula Faye just wears me and everyone else around her plumb out. Most people learn early on that it’s wise to just go ahead and do whatever Lula Faye wants done once she backs you up against a wall. It’s easier that way and usually takes less time and energy than arguing with her.

  Sometimes I pity her preacher. Whoever he happens to be at the time. That church can’t seem to keep hold of a preacher for more than a year or two and I have a good idea why. I know for a fact that last East
er she sat down and wrote a sermon she wanted her preacher to preach. She even sketched out on paper suggestions she had for hand gestures. I about swallowed my teeth when she showed it to me. That preacher left a week later. Just picked up and moved his whole family out of state. Lula Faye couldn’t figure out why he would do such a thing when she’d tried to be so helpful.

  I’ve heard rumors that word has even gotten out in the preacher schools about Lula Faye. Don’t know if it’s true, but I heard for a fact that the preacher selection committee at Lula Faye’s church started running out of candidates who would apply for the job.

  It ain’t just the preachers that Lula Faye scares off, either. She likes to give the preacher’s wives a few little helpful suggestions now and again. Like comments on their clothes and how they keep house, and how they raise their kids. I have an idea that might have something to do with the frequent turnover of preachers at Lula Faye’s church. None of my business of course. It ain’t my church and I got opinions about people who have too many opinions about other people’s churches.

  Basically, I think the main problem is that Lula Faye is one of them high energy people who don’t have enough to do with their time.

  Lula Faye had a husband for a while. His name was Earl but everyone called him Poor Stupid Earl because Lula Faye always called him that and it kinda stuck. That was a shame because Earl weren’t stupid and he weren’t poor. He was, however, kinda weak and Lula knew how to take advantage of a person’s weakness, but only for their own good of course.

  Actually, if you want the whole story, Lula Faye accidentally gave him a last name, too. Behind his back a lot of people called him “Poor-Stupid-Earl-Bless-His-Heart.”

  Every time I’d see her back when Earl was alive, she’d tell me something he’d done that she thought was dumb and then she’d say something along the lines of, “Oh, Doreen. That poor stupid Earl, bless his heart, went and forgot to put oil in the riding lawnmower again and it done all burnt up.” Or, “That poor stupid Earl, bless his heart, done ran off the side of the road and got stuck in a ditch.”

  Funny thing, Earl was a smart man. One of the few men in our county who graduated from college back then which was quite an accomplishment for a boy who crawled out from these hills. Taught at Greenup High School most of his life, won some awards with his kids in the science club if I remember right. But to Lula Faye he was just poor, stupid, Earl, bless-his-heart.

  In case you ain’t never lived here, people who live in Kentucky know that if you say, bless his or her heart, in a certain tone of voice before saying something bad about someone it takes the sting out of the statement and don’t make you sound so mean. Like you love ‘em a whole lot, but they do have this one regrettable trait. Lula Faye does it with Marva, too.

  “Now, Marva, bless her heart, just don’t know a thing about running off the bulletin. She uses the wrong color ink. I could do such a better job. It’s just pitiful.”

  “Pitiful” is a word Lula Faye uses a lot, too. She also likes the word “precious.” People, in Lula Faye’s world are either “pitiful” or “precious.” Except for Earl, who was poor and stupid.

  Actually, I always liked Earl a sight better than I did Lula Faye. He was a kind man who wore an expression on his face as though he could hardly believe what he’d gotten himself into. Nobody much noticed when he passed away, though. He was that sort of person. If there hadn’t been a funeral that Lula Faye was in charge of and therefore quite a show, people might not have noticed he was gone for some time. He was the kind of person you didn’t notice right off. It was Lula Faye you noticed with her big voice, and loud laugh and bright red lipstick.

  Now I know bright red lipstick ain’t exactly a Baptist thing, but Lula Faye wore it anyway. She said she looked too washed out without it. That red lipstick might have been a sign of things to come if I’d cared enough to notice.

  Anyway, Earl died way up in Huntington. He was supposed to be at some sort of miniature train conference. He liked making little train tracks in his and Lula Faye’s basement. Model trains were one of the few things Lula had no interest in or opinion on so I guess when he was in his basement he felt like he had some control over his own life—more or less.

  You would’ve thought that being widowed at the tender age of sixty-two would have caused Lula Faye to rethink her life a little. Maybe ease up on the people around her, but she stuffed her grief over Earl down deep—I think she really did love the man—pasted a smile on her face, and kept on doing what she’d been doing most of her life which was bossing everyone around who came near her.

  Then the preacher selection committee found one more preacher willing to come to our neck of the woods and the committee people weren’t real particular by this time. Roy Abernathy did not have a seminary education or even a high school education. What he had was a GED. He knew his Bible, though and was willing to work for the small salary they was offering--which is what the committee must have decided is what really counts in a preacher.

  Roy was rough as a cob to look at and nearly as opinionated as Lula Faye. We found out later that he’d spent the first half of his adult life in prison where a chaplain got hold of him and turned him around. I’ve never known a preacher who got his Bible education while sitting in a prison cell, but I guess he must’ve had plenty of time to study it. The man could quote long passages from the Bible at the drop of a hat.

  He came to that church craggy-faced and solemn and without any of the inconvenient baggage most preachers carry around with them—like a wife and kids. Best of all, he weren’t scared of Lula Faye. He weren’t even impressed by her. I guess when a man has survived years of incarceration with murderers and thieves a bossy woman ain’t nothin’ to worry about. I’m pretty sure his lack of being scared of Lula Faye was one of the things that endeared him to the rest of the church. I’ll just be flat-out honest here. That Lula Faye could be a bully, bless her heart.

  I’ll tell you a funny about him and her. He’d only been there a week or two and Lula Faye hadn’t got a handle on who she was dealing with. She had a big idea for Vacation Bible School—something she’d seen on some sort of computer video thing I think she called You Two or Tube Face or something like that—and she cornered her new preacher to tell him all the reasons why he oughta make it happen.

  Me and her was having us some lunch at the little restaurant one of our local gas stations has, and Preacher Roy Abernathy came walking in to pay for his gasoline. Lula Faye jumped up and started chattering to him about what he oughta do about VBS. He paid for his gas, put his wallet back into his pocket and then he looked her square in the face and said, “No.”

  Just that. A simple “no.”

  Lula Faye weren’t sure she’d heard him correctly so she told him all about it again. He waited for her to run out of breath and then he shook his head and said, “No” again. Then he walked on out of there and left Lula Faye standing in the middle of the gas station looking at the door like she couldn’t believe her eyes or her ears. She weren’t used to being told “no.”

  Of course, I was sitting there trying not to choke on my barbecue sandwich, but it was just about the funniest thing I’d ever seen. Lula Faye was quiet and pensive for the rest of the afternoon like she was trying to figure some things out.

  So—back to my story—I got this phone call from Lula Faye right after I’d been to the beauty shop for my perm. She said she needed to see me right away and was I at home and could she come over?

  If I hadn’t been feeling pretty good about myself right then because of my fresh hairdo I probably would have turned her down. But since I was in a good mood, I thought I could handle a visit from her and told her yes, to just come on over and we’d have us a nice visit.

  Since I’d already watered my garden and had been to the beauty shop and all, there weren’t a whole lot for me to do to get ready. No last-minute throwing on a clean dress or anything. I even had me some fresh pickle loaf lunch meat I’d picked up at the grocery st
ore and a new loaf of white bread and some beef steak tomatoes I’d gotten out of the garden and sliced up. The only thing left that I needed to do was make us a pitcher of sweet iced tea to wash the pickle loaf down with. I had half a carrot cake from the day before when we had a potluck at my church so I even had desert, too. Lula Faye was always a fool for any kind of cake.

  So I made that sweet tea, put it in the fridge, and then went out to sit on my front porch feeling spiffy. I had on my next-to-best house dress, was fresh from the beauty shop with my new cut and perm, and had the fixings of a real nice lady-lunch all ready to go when Lula Faye came to visit. I didn’t think she could find too much fault in anything, although with Lula Faye you couldn’t never tell what she might find to criticize.

  It weren’t that she was mean, Lula Faye had a heart of gold, and if you didn’t pick up on that fact right away, she’d tell you so. The problem was, Lula Faye was what some people call a perfectionist and she just had to have things perfect or at the very least point out the flaw to everyone around.

  Now me, I kinda like flaws, whether they be in people or furniture or houses. I think it makes things more interesting. It’s probably one of the reasons I like living here in South Shore, Kentucky which has plenty of flaws.

  Perfection ain’t all that interesting to me, but maybe I’m just justifying my own flaws and I got plenty of them, too. Can’t help it. That’s the way life is. Sometimes it can kinda beat a person up. I guess that’s why I don’t usually find young folk all that interesting anymore. There they are, all shiny and new and stupid with big ideas and big plans. All of ‘em thinkin’ they won’t be like us. They won’t never get old or sick or have to scrape to put two cents together. Except for that Peterson boy who comes to mow my lawn. He’s starting to act like he’s got good sense.