Blanche on the Lam: A Blanche White Mystery (3 page)

“I'm sure you can find everything you need.” The woman looked around the kitchen like a bellhop checking the towels. “There will be three at table for lunch. We shall want lunch at eleven-forty-five. You may use the room up these stairs, first door on the left, to freshen up. You won't be coming back here, so don't leave anything behind.” The woman gave Blanche an expectant look.

“Yes, ma'am,” Blanche told her. “I understand.” Blanche thought the woman was about to add something, when the phone rang. The woman turned abruptly and pushed a swinging door that Blanche assumed separated the kitchen from the rest of the house. The phone fell silent in mid-ring.

Blanche leaned against the butcher-block station and let her breath out in a slow, steady stream. If the agency had found a replacement for her, that person had to show up pretty soon. Then what? Miz Mistress was sure to call the sheriff. To save face after having let a stranger into her house, she might even claim that Blanche had pushed her way in uninvited or tried to steal something. If I had any sense, Blanche thought, I'd leave now. But which way was out? A look out the kitchen window showed her a walled-in yard that didn't have a wooded path like the one they'd taken to the house. If she went through the front of the house she might run into the woman, and she certainly couldn't find her way through the house to the way she'd entered.

She heard a noise on the other side of the swinging door and quickly slipped on the bright-eyed but vacant expression behind
which she'd hid from the woman so far. Blanche had learned long ago that signs of pleasant stupidity in household help made some employers feel more comfortable, as though their wallets, their car keys, and their ideas about themselves were all safe. Putting on a dumb act was something many black people considered unacceptable, but she sometimes found it a useful place to hide. She also got a lot of secret pleasure from fooling people who assumed they were smarter than she was by virtue of the way she looked and made her living.

“That was your agency,” the woman said as she entered the kitchen. “They called to say you weren't going to be able to make it until tomorrow! Can you imagine! I gave them quite a lecture about their lack of efficiency.”

The woman looked so pleased with herself, Blanche wondered if she got her jollies from telling people off—or maybe it was the novelty that perked her up.

“They want you to call them. Perhaps after lunch.” She turned her head to give Blanche another of those mouth-only smiles and bumped into a chair. “Ow!” The woman pushed the chair away from her as though it had been the attacker. She turned sharply and left the kitchen as though the whole room might be in cahoots with the chair.

That was the second time Blanche had seen her stumble. There was something about the woman's clumsiness that reminded Blanche of Deke Williams, the stunt man for whom she'd once worked. She used to love to listen to Deke explain things like how to take the least painful fall, and how Charlie Chaplin had raised falling to an art form. There was certainly nothing arty about this person's stumbling around.

Blanche looked at her watch—10:45. How could so much have happened to her in so few hours? She opened the refrigerator. Three of its spacious shelves held artfully decorated and arranged platters of cold meats and salads, as well as two trays of yeast rolls waiting for the oven. Good. She had plenty of time to
make her phone calls. She'd noticed that the woman had gone to the front of the house to answer the phone instead of using the one hanging on the kitchen wall. She wondered if this was the colored-only phone—this was Dixie, after all. But she thought it more likely that the woman had been expecting a call she didn't want overheard. Blanche went to the swinging door and pushed it gently to see if her employer was anywhere around. Blanche didn't want her phone calls overheard either. Beyond the swinging door was a pantry with shelves and a narrow counter on either side. There was another swinging door at the other end of the pantry. It lead to the dining room. Blanche took a quick peek. No one there. She listened. Nothing. She decided to take the chance while she had it and went back to the kitchen to make her calls.

“It's me, Mama.”

“I was wondering where you was. I want you to stop by the...”

“Listen, Mama. I only got a second.” Blanche lowered her voice and kept her eyes on the swinging door. The urgency in her tone stopped her mother from objecting to being interrupted in mid-order.

“I wanted to tell you I'm safe. I...”

“What you mean, 'safe'?” her mother wanted to know. “I don't know nothin' about you not being safe!”

“I can't explain right now, Mama. Just trust me and take care of the kids until I can...If the sheriff or anyone asks, say you haven't talked to me. Say you figure I've run off to New Orleans, like I been talking about doing. But please don't let the kids hear you say that...They're all right, ain't they? Yes, I know you're not a lying woman, Mama, so you know it must be important, or I wouldn't ask you to do it. I'll call you again just as soon as I can. Give Taifa and Malik my love, and tell them I'm sorry I couldn't call while they were home, and tell them I'll...”

“Don't you worry about these children,” Miz Cora interrupted. “My grandbabies is just fine here with me, just fine.”

For a few seconds after her mother hung up, Blanche continued to hold the receiver to her ear and stare at the wall in front of her. Her mother's words hung in her mind like heavy weather. There was no mistaking her tone. Blanche felt herself a soldier being forewarned of the coming war.

It seemed ironic that after California, and all of her resistance and anger over being saddled with Taifa and Malik, she was afraid to leave town without them—even though that clearly made sense. She didn't want to have to fight her mother to get them back. The idea of fighting her mother made her stomach tighten. It had taken Blanche a long time to feel like her own woman, out from under Miz Cora's strong hand. Her mother had not approved of her refusal to belong to the church, her leaving Farleigh for New York, her decision to continue to do domestic work instead of being a nurse like her sister or some other mother-proud profession. They'd been fighting for nearly twenty years over Blanche's unstraightened hair. In those years, Blanche's relationship with Miz Cora had grown less contentious, as Blanche had proved that she was both moral and ungodly, that New York would not automatically make her a junkie, and that she would not be arrested as a revolutionary because of her hairdo. Still, in her mother's house, where Miz Cora's spirit seemed to be the major ingredient holding walls and floors together, Blanche sometimes felt she was once again in ankle socks and braids. She didn't intend for Taifa and Malik to have to fight so hard for their freedom. She dialed the phone again. Ardell answered on the first ring.

“Hey, girlfriend. I was just thinking about you. How'd it go this morn—What's wrong?”

Ardell's recognition that something was wrong before Blanche told her so was one of the reasons why their friendship was almost as old as they were. All through Blanche's New York years, through the year in which Blanche had lived in California as a grownup runaway, through Ardell's crazy
marriage and religious conversion (and unconversion), they'd supported and encouraged each other with an intensity and constancy that had often made their men jealous and suspicious. Neither Blanche nor Ardell paid that any mind. They didn't think their relationship was anybody else's business and were both quick to say so.

“Oh, girl! You are not going to believe this shit!” Blanche proceeded to bring Ardell up to date and asked her to call the women whose houses Blanche had agreed to clean in the next few days.

“I'll tell them you got the flu. And I'll go by and see if there's anything your mama needs doing.”

“That's what I really need. I feel so bad dumping all this worry on Mama and the kids, too.”

“I'd be glad to keep the kids, but you know Miz Cora will rip out my jugular vein if I even suggest she part with her grand-babies! As for worry, Miz Cora has handled a whole lot worse than this! Don't you go looking for things to be upset about. You got enough on your plate.” Ardell paused, then added, “I think what I really need to do is borrow a car and come get your butt!”

“No. We're leaving for their place in the country in a couple of hours. I'll be safer there. But right now, I need to get off this phone and get these people's lunch on the table.” She spoke quickly and urgently, trying to cut Ardell off from where she was surely headed with her comment about borrowing a car. Blanche knew just whose car Ardell had in mind. But her effort to derail Ardell was as futile as it usually was.

“What about Leo?” Ardell's voice was a study in nonchalance that didn't fool Blanche for a second. “You want me to call him? He—”

“Don't even start it, Ardell. You know how I feel about Leo. I've told you I—”

“All right, all right,” Ardell interrupted. “You just let me know how I can help.”

“Thanks, honey. I'll be in touch.” Blanche hung up the receiver and drummed her fingers on the counter. In a way she was grateful to Ardell for bringing up Leo. She needed something to get on her left nerve, to keep her from feeling sorry for herself or too scared to function. And there was nothing like the mention of Leo to raise her temperature.

They hadn't been a couple since high school. But some people in town, including Ardell, seemed to think they were star-crossed lovers. And she wasn't sure Leo didn't think the same thing, bringing the kids toys and games, and helping them with their homework. If a way to a man's heart was through his stomach, surely the way to a mother's heart was through her children. Unfortunately, he also offered her unsolicited advice on everything from how she should raise them to what she should wear. And as if to irritate her even more, Taifa and Malik, with prompting from no one, had taken to calling him Uncle Leo. If Blanche had ten dollars for every time she'd told him to mind his own damned business, she'd have enough money to buy a car and leave town right now. But no matter how she screamed at him, or how sarcastic she became, he was always willing to help her in whatever way she needed, even as he lectured her about being impractical and half-crazy. Maybe that was what irritated her most. It was as if he'd decided to wear her down with kindness and decency. Well, she certainly didn't want him butting his nose in now, chastising her for not having come to him for the money she needed, and treating her as though she ought to have a keeper! Fortified by her indignation over Leo, she turned to face her current situation with a bit more confidence.

Yes, there is an end to this, she told herself. I've lived through times at least as bad. Having her apartment building burn down in the heart of winter, with two kids to care for, was surely as terrible as going to jail for thirty days. Having everything that was portable stolen from her apartment and then being mugged on the street not once, not twice, but three times in as many weeks,
was certainly in the same ball park as being on the run from the sheriff. I just got to be up to whatever I got to do, she told herself.

She moved around the kitchen, opening cabinets in search of plates. The first door she opened revealed shelves full of raspberry vinegar, coriander, virgin olive oil, saffron, things she'd used with regularity in the kitchens of the smart Manhattan condos and lofts, and the mellow old family-owned brownstones where she'd rented out her services as cook, housekeeper, lady's maid, housemaid, waitress, laundress, seamstress—whichever of her services, or set of services, an employer needed to buy and could afford. The kitchens she came across now that she was reduced to day work in Farleigh were more likely to be stocked with Crisco than caviar. Rich and well fed, she thought, and wondered about the people who would take the other two places at lunch. She tasted a bit of Italian pimiento, a few French capers. In other kitchens, she'd sometimes held foreign foods and imagined herself buying them in their country of origin. Sometimes, this fantasy led to the realization of how much there was to see and do in the world, and how little of it she was likely to experience. Today, she'd have traded a chance to travel the globe for the ability to simply go home.

She was distracted from the fermented beans on her fingertip by the certain knowledge that she was about to have a visitor she knew was not the blond woman. Blanche turned toward the back door. It was slowly opened by a short, plump young man with almond-shaped eyes. He wore a dark blue suit that could have been a uniform, even though he wore his pants high in the crotch and belted tightly above his belly. The belt wasn't in the belt loops. Although he wasn't all that hefty, he reminded Blanche of the Japanese sumo wrestlers she'd seen on TV late one night when she couldn't sleep for worrying about how to pay the gas bill and the electric bill with the same sixty-five dollars. His whole body was round, from the dome of his balding head (although he looked no more than twenty-five or so) to his rounded shoulders,
baby paunch, and round-toed Buster Brown shoes. A black strap held a pair of glasses with clear plastic frames onto his face. One large, plump hand clutched the doorknob. There was an air of harmlessness about him that was puzzling in a white male.

“Hey.” His voice was sweeter than she'd expected. She nodded. “Mumsfield,” he said, thumping his chest lightly. He closed the door behind him and gave her a shy, gap-toothed smile. Blanche was partial to gap-toothed folks, having a significant space between her own front teeth.

“Blanche.” She slowly screwed the lid back on the jar she was holding, but her attention was on the young man. She'd known someone was about to come through the back door, and it was him.

“I drive the car.” Mumsfield hiked his pants even higher. Red-blond hairs curled on his wrists below the sleeves of his jacket. Chauffeur, Blanche thought, and continued opening cabinets.

“I am very good with automobiles.” He said the last word very slowly, releasing each syllable separately, as though he hated to let it go. “Very good with automobiles,” he repeated.

Conceited chauffeur, Blanche thought, and kinda country or something. She wondered why the woman hadn't given him time off like the rest of the regular help, then remembered they were going to the country after lunch. She hoped this wasn't one of those families who needed the hired help to do everything but wipe their behinds.