Murder On the Mississippi Queen, Page 2

Anyway—where was I now? Oh yes, Lula Faye. As I sat there waiting, I realized that Lula Faye hadn’t sounded so good to me on the phone. Kinda strangled-like. She didn’t talk my ear off like usual, either. Just asked if I was home and could she come on over. All serious. Of course if I hadn’t of said yes she’d have come on over anyway. That’s Lula Faye’s way.

  One of the nice things about staying in one place and being raised up with people you’ve known all your life is that you usually know their mama and daddy and more often than not their grandparents too. That can help you understand why some people are the way they are.

  I’d watched Lula Faye get raised up by the most nervous, high strung woman we ever had around these parts. Aunt Belle was all powder and rayon dresses and hose with seams up the back and little tiny sandwiches on a tray when you came over. She made company sandwiches out of Cheez Whiz and white bread with the crusts cut off and a little tiny sweet pickle on the side. For some reason that business of cutting off the crusts got on my mama’s last nerve.

  “What’s wrong with crusts?” Mama would say. “Belle must think she’s something on a stick, making sure she cuts off the crusts and cuts them into little squares and triangles.”

  “Now, Milly,” my daddy would say. “She’s just high strung. That’s all. You got to remember, Belle’s from Georgia and they do things different there. Maybe she don’t know no better than to waste perfectly good bread by cutting off the crusts.”

  My mama didn’t believe in wasting anything. She even told me when I was a little girl that if I ate the crusts off my bread I’d end up with curly hair. Mama lied about that. My hair is straight as a poker. I didn’t never get curly hair until I got my job over at Selby Shoes across the Ohio River and got my first pay check. First thing I did with my first few dollars I earned all by myself was go to the beauty shop and get myself a permanent wave. Had one ever since. I just don’t feel right unless my hair has some curl in it. I see old women walking around with their hair all gray and straight and flat on top of their heads and they don’t look like they got good sense to me.

  Now, what was I talking about?

  Oh yes, Lula Faye. Turned out her mama weren’t dressing up and putting on high heels and a pearlite necklace and making sure her seams were straight just because she was from Georgia. Nope. Belle had a few problems we didn’t know nothing about when Uncle Jasper came back from the army already married to her and acting like he had himself a movie star actress on his arm. Proud as punch.

  Me, I always thought Aunt Belle seemed a might distracted, like she was hearing music no one else heard, or thinking thoughts no one else had thought before, but that turned out not to be it. Aunt Belle had a party going on in her mind that none of us knew nothing about.

  Now there I go, getting ready to tell you all about poor Aunt Belle, bless her heart, and it just wouldn’t be the right thing to do. My mama always said if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say nothing at all, and there’s not a whole lot nice I can say about Aunt Belle except she pretty much spoiled Lula Faye to death.

  You ever see Nellie Olson on that TV show called Little House on the Prairie? There was that bossy little girl with the blonde curls big as sausages and a bow in her hair and a big frown? That kinda describes Lula Faye growing up. Aunt Belle kept her in these frilly dresses with big bows in her hair and taught her how to sit with her legs crossed at the ankles all the time. Aunt Belle would fuss at her even when she was little and it was just us kids playing around and some women friends visiting together. My mama later said when word got out about Aunt Belle, that maybe she should have tried keeping her legs crossed at the ankles! But there I go. About to say something bad about someone instead of nice.

  So something I can say nice, let me see. Well, Aunt Belle always smelled good. It was that rose-scented toilet water she wore, my mama said. My daddy made the mistake of saying that in her defense once when Mama was going on and on about all of Aunt Belle’s peculiarities. Daddy said, “Well at least the woman smells good.”

  Mama got mad and said if she had some of that expensive imported toilet water like Uncle Jasper paid good money to get for Aunt Belle, maybe she’d smell like roses, too.

  Daddy had the good sense to quit talking about that time. I was little and couldn’t figure out why toilet water would be a good thing or why it would be expensive. Making water in an outdoor toilet was something I was familiar with ‘cause we didn’t have no indoor plumbing at home back in them days and our toilet never smelt like roses to me, so I was a little confused, except Aunt Belle’s perfume was pretty loud, and sometimes made my nose and eyes water when it was fresh and she hugged me—so I thought maybe she might have gotten it from a toilet after all.

  I was nearly twenty before I realized one day when I was watching some program on TV that it must have been “toilette” water they were talking about—something Frenchy and fancy—and not water you’d find in a toilet at all.

  Where was I now?

  Oh yes. I was trying not to say anything bad about Aunt Belle even if she did run off with the postman when Uncle Jasper’s back was turned. Lula Faye was seventeen when that happened and all that time she’d thought she was the apple of her mama’s eye and it turned out it was Hadley Phillips, the postman who was really the apple of Aunt Belle’s eye.

  Mama said she’d wondered why the mail was always so late getting to our house.

  It was a shock to Lula Faye of course. And Uncle Jasper, too, but mainly Lula Faye. I have to admit, by the time Aunt Belle run off, I was eighteen and getting a little tired of Lula Faye and her always acting like her you-know-what didn’t stink so I kinda enjoyed the fact that Aunt Belle had run off. At least I enjoyed it for a couple seconds and then I got hold of myself and started feeling bad for Uncle Jasper. He was a nice man.

  Problem was, other people felt sorry for Uncle Jasper, too, and some of them were of the middle-aged female persuasion. Lot of them were good cooks which came in handy since Lula Faye didn’t know how to make nothing to eat except them little bitty sandwiches like her mama made. I guess Cheez Whiz sandwiches can get old after a while, even if you do cut the crusts off.

  After some of the women of our town figured out that Uncle Jasper might be up for grabs and him a good upstanding man with a decent job and a heart of gold and a veteran to boot, well, let’s just say them were the days of the casserole wars at Uncle Jasper’s and Lula Faye’s. Uncle Jasper never ate so good but Lula Faye was embarrassed out of her mind.

  Uncle Jasper didn’t remarry for a long time and he made a good thing of it, too. His grocery bill probably weren’t nothing considering the fact that all them lonely women kept bringing him sympathy food and Uncle Jasper apparently developed a need for a whole lot of sympathy.

  He was naturally upset when Aunt Belle left him, but after things calmed down Uncle Jasper looked around and saw the possibilities stretched out before him—so to speak—and developed this pitiful, sad face and soulful eyes, and started enjoying his role as the most eligible bachelor in South Shore, Kentucky.

  Lula Faye was furious at him for acting like that, and the more ashamed she was of him, the better Baptist she become. That woman could run a Vacation Bible School like you never saw. There had to be five different shades of Kool-Aid for her church’s kids and no store-bought cookies at her refreshment table. No sir! She personally vetted each church member’s contributions to the refreshment table and if them VBS cookies looked like they might have spent time boxed up on a grocery store shelf, she’d wrinkle up her nose and push them to the side. I heard her say once, when someone new to her church handed her a plate of Nutter-Butter cookies, that maybe she’d bring them out for the children if they ran out of the “good” cookies first.

  I have a suspicion that Earl might have eaten a few of them evil store-bought cookies down in his hidey-hole in the basement where he had his train track. All I know is I saw him a’sneaking them out from under the VBS table when she weren’t looking, an
d he had a little smile on his face like he had big plans for them Nutter-Butters.

  Anyways.

  Where was I again? Oh yes. I think I was about to tell you how Lula Faye ended up on my doorstep a’crying that day.

  Well, I was on the front porch when she drove up and got out of her car. I knew in an instant that something was bad wrong. Lula Faye didn’t look so good. Her face was all splotchy, her hair was standing up in odd places, and her green shirtwaist dress was buttoned up wrong and hanging down at her knees a couple of buttons off. Of course that made the neck of her dress all wee-waw and funny looking. The woman hadn’t even dressed herself properly. That had never happened before.

  “What on earth is wrong, Lula Faye?” I stood up while I waited for her to climb up the porch stairs. Lula Faye in this sort of shape weren’t a sitting-down matter. I was genuinely concerned.

  She didn’t answer me because it looked like she was too busy trying not to burst out bawling. Instead, she walked into my arms and just held onto me and started sobbing and shaking. I hadn’t seen her this upset ever in my life. Not even when Poor-Stupid-Earl-Bless-His-Heart died. I couldn’t begin to imagine what might have happened to cause her to fall apart like this.

  Now we ain’t exactly a hugging family. If anything, we tend to hold each other at arm’s length most of the time—but today weren’t the time to hold to that family tradition. Lula Faye was heart-broken and I was getting’ scared of what the matter was, so I wrapped my arms around my cousin and held on.

  “You’ll hate me,” Lula Faye pulled away from me finally, wiped her eyes, and swallowed a couple of sobs. “You’ll think I’m as awful as my mama.”

  Well, actually, I’d never thought her mama was all that awful except back when I still thought she wore perfume that she’d gotten out of an outhouse.

  “Tell me what you done, Lula Faye,” I said. “Just spit it out. You ain’t killed nobody have you?” Then a thought struck. Maybe she was more like her mama than I’d thought. “You been a’sleeping in someone’s bed you got no right to be sleeping in?”

  “Of course not.” She took two steps back from me and in doing so nearly fell off the porch into my pink begonias. I had to grab hold again and steady her. “I’d never do something like that. What kind of a person do you think I am?”

  “I don’t know.” I let go of her. “You got to tell me what you did first.”

  “Let’s go inside,” she said, suddenly getting all suspicious around the eyes. “I don’t want anyone else to know.”

  So we went inside, and she sat down on my couch and smoothed her dress down over her knees like her mama taught her way back in elementary school—although the fact that her dress was buttoned up wrong kinda spoiled the effect.

  “You ever do something bad, Doreen?” she asked. “Something you’d be ashamed for other people to know?”

  The sobbing was over, but she grabbed a tissue from a box beside her and started dabbing her eyes because they were still leaking.

  I gave her question some thought before I answered. Had I ever done something I was ashamed of? Well, I got a quick mouth on me and I tell people off sometimes when I probably shouldn’t. Sometimes I eat a few too many lemon-flavored Moon Pies when I’m feeling lonely. I don’t get all gooshy-eyed over babies like some women do, and I’ve been known to watch a little more TV than is good for me—but bad? Really bad? I’d never seen anything I wanted to do bad enough to deal with the aggravation and consequences.

  “No,” I said. “I ain’t done nothing all that bad. Why?”

  “Well, don’t judge me ‘til I tell you the whole thing,” Lula Faye said. “Promise?”

  “I’ll do the best I can not to judge,” I said. “But I ain’t making any promises. What did you go and do, Lula Faye? Rob a bank?”

  I was starting to wish I’d gone ahead and had me a sandwich of that nice pickle loaf I’d bought. It didn’t look like this was going to be the luncheon I was expecting after all and now I was getting hungry.

  “I won the lottery,” she sniffled.

  “You what?” I weren’t sure I heard her right.

  “I won the lottery.”

  “You mean the twenty-dollar scratch off kind?”

  “No, Doreen. I mean I won the whole dang thing.”

  Well now that give me something new to think about. Lula Faye might have had her faults, but she weren’t no liar…and the lottery had been getting a lot of press lately. It had gone up and up and a lot of people had been playing it who wouldn’t usually. Anyway, it must be true because I’d never heard Lula Faye say the word “dang” before in her life. It would take something powerful big for her to say that. In Lula Faye’s world, that’s right up there with using the real D-word.

  “You what?” I really didn’t know what else to day. It ain’t every day that your first cousin tells you she won the lottery and uses a bad word to boot. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a ticket-thingy and showed it to me. I didn’t know quite what to make of it. I don’t follow the lottery, so to speak.

  “It’s all the right numbers. I played my hunches and they were the right ones this time.”

  “But you’re a Baptist!” I said. “I didn’t think Baptists were allowed to gamble.”

  “I know,” she wailed. “Gambling’s a sin and that makes me nothing but a big fat sinner!”

  Now, I know I’ve heard that preached my whole life, that gambling’s a sin—and I’m sure if a body is going to take food out of their children’s mouth or gamble off the farm, it’s a sin for sure. But winning it? Was that a sin? I had no idea. I weren’t no Baptist.

  “How long you been playing?” I asked.

  “A long time,” she admitted. “I always drove to another town, though. I didn’t want anybody to know. It was a bad secret I kept inside for a lot of years.”

  “Even when Earl was alive?” I asked.

  “Poor stupid Earl never knew a thing, bless his heart, but yes—I’m ashamed to say that I did. It give me something to do while he was playing with his trains. It was kind of like I had this little secret sin that wasn’t hurting anyone. I never spent a lot of money on it.”

  I leaned forward. This was fascinating. Maybe Lula weren’t completely the righteous pain in the neck I’d always thought she was.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t know!” she sniffled. “If I collect the money, people will know what I done.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t be considered a sin if you give it all to the church.”

  She clutched her purse to her chest—like I was fixing to take it away from her.

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “Why not if you don’t want it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want it. And besides, I’m not going to let that jail bird preacher have it, that’s for sure!”

  Well, now. I guess that would pay him back for telling Lula Faye “no.”

  “How much did you get?” I finally thought to ask.

  I weren’t prepared for the answer, though. I hadn’t been paying a whole lot of attention to the numbers. I might have some weaknesses of my own, but they tend to run to the moon pie variety and gambling weren’t one of them.

  “There aren’t any other winners,” Lula Faye said. A gleeful look stole over her face. “If I turn this ticket in I’m supposed to get fifty-two million dollars.”

  Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I didn’t even know how to wrap my mind around such a figure.

  “Fifty-two million dollars?” I asked.

  She nodded. Her eyes as big as saucers like a little girl who just told somebody a big secret.

  “You?”

  She nodded again.

  “Anybody else know about this?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “Why are you telling me?” I asked.

  “Because you’re smarter than me,” sh
e said. “You always were. I figured you’d know what to do.”

  Well, now that’s the first I ever heard her say anything like that. I’d always thought she treated me like I didn’t have a brain in my head.

  I live on a social security check that comes to just under eight hundred dollars a month. It’s better than nothing, but it ain’t anything to write home about. My little house is paid for. I know how to keep a good garden, and I don’t eat much. I don’t own a car. The biggest thing I pay for is my electricity bill which I try to keep under fifty dollars a month by hanging out my laundry to dry and keeping the thermostat turned way down. I buy what clothes I wear at Goodwill or sometimes at the Dollar Store if I’m hankering after something new. They got pretty good-looking clothes at the Dollar Store these days.

  All thoughts of pickle loaf went plumb out of my freshly permed head. I just sat there with my teeth in my mouth, as my mama used to say when someone was too surprised to speak. Then my stomach growled and I decided even if someone has just won fifty-two million dollars, a body still has to eat.

  “You want a pickle loaf sandwich?” I asked. “I got sweet tea, too.”

  “Maybe just a nibble,” Lula Faye said. “I doubt I can hold anything down much.”

  Go ahead and call me a hypocrite, but I cut the crusts off them sandwiches just like Lula Faye liked when she was a little girl. I’d never done that before for her but I’d also never had a millionaire sitting with her feet under my table and her dress buttoned crooked before. I weren’t real sure what the etiquette for such a situation was supposed to be.

  “What are people going to think of me, Doreen?” Lula Faye said. “What are they going to be saying behind my back?”

  “Does it matter?”

  To tell the truth, I liked her better today than I ever had. It weren’t because of the money. It was because for the first time in our lives she weren’t trying to boss me around. In fact, the first words out of her mouth after she took a bite out of that pickle loaf sandwich was that my new perm looked nice.

  “Seriously, Doreen.” She took a big gulp of the sweet tea I’d set in front of her and reached for another sandwich. So much for that little nibble. “What are people going to think?”