“Ardis called me,” she said when we were out of view and earshot. “She said there were more conversations going on this afternoon than the three of you can keep track of. She said crime is definitely paying and asked me to provide backup. The costume was my own idea.” She beamed. “What do you think?” She smoothed her tweed skirt, folded her hands, and assumed an innocent look. Then she grimaced and tugged at her waistband. “I haven’t worn stockings for years and now I remember why. Horrible things. Like sausage casings. But worth it, don’t you think?”
“Jane Marple?”
“I probably look more like Margaret Rutherford doing Jane Marple, or Elsa Lanchester doing Margaret Rutherford doing Jane Marple, but yes.”
“You look perfect.”
“And I would hardly be convincing as V.I.”
“Who?”
“V. I. Warshawski, dear. Haven’t you read Sarah Paretsky’s books?”
“Oh, right.” For a horrible, surreal second I’d thought she meant Vitally Important Geneva.
“I’d better get back,” she said. “One of those women is a cousin of the husband of the woman who cleans for Bonny. She might not really know anything useful, but she has strong opinions about everything she does know. I’ll make a full report at our next meeting.”
“Are you taking notes?” I wasn’t sure that was such a good idea.
She patted my arm reassuringly and whispered. “Not notes. They’re too obvious. I borrowed my grandson’s solid-state, voice-activated recorder. It’s under the knitting in my basket.”
She yanked at her waistband again and went back to the front room. I continued downstairs, not sure recording was such a good idea, either. If it turned out that secret recordings were illegal, and someone found out and kicked up a fuss, who was Clod Dunbar more likely to arrest—his former Sunday school teacher in her sweet little old lady outfit, or me?
F
or lack of a community center in Blue Plum, or a meeting space large enough and not associated with one or another denomination, the Historical Trust Annual Meeting and Potluck was held in the grade school gym. The first thing I noticed when my thrown-together green salad and I entered—I in my flowery crepe skirt, low heels, and pink silk blouse and the salad in Granny’s green glass lettuce-leaf bowl—was the lack of a gymnasium fug hanging in the air. I’d worried about that, wondering how eau de PE would mix with this high-tone potluck. Instead I caught whiffs of fried chicken, baked beans, and hot rolls.
The next thing I noticed was that most of the other women wore pants. In fact, many wore jeans. There were a few skirts and dresses and a smattering of jackets and ties, but they were all worn by people who appeared to be over seventy. Or over eighty. That there were no children and almost no one under thirty didn’t surprise me. I’d given my share of presentations to preservation groups and historical societies and knew the demographics involved.
The gym’s double doors put us at one end of the room. Rows of tables covered in paper tablecloths stretched to the right. I joined the people bearing their hot and cold offerings to four more tables along the wall
to the left. The Spivey twins met me there. They wore capris and matching polyester blouson tops in virtually the same shade of pink as my blouse. I shuddered.
“Green salad,” Mercy said. It wasn’t an enthusiastic greeting, but it was accurate and brief, so I smiled. She was easy to identify this evening. She’d dosed herself with an extra dash of cologne for the occasion. Up close, the extra dash wrestled with the smell of good cooking. Fortunately for anyone standing within nose-shot of Mercy, the aromas of chicken, beans, and hot rolls were muscular enough to come out on top.
Shirley smiled back at me and nudged Mercy’s shoulder with her own.
Mercy cleared her throat. “Yes. How wonderful. We certainly can’t have too many green salads.” She took the bowl from me and nestled it amongst five or six other bowls on the table.
“Is this your first?” Shirley asked, still smiling.
“Salad?” Not the first at the potluck, anyway. There were actually seven other bowls already on the table—all salads—all green. One or two of them, unless they had avocado or bacon bits lurking under their chopped iceberg, looked even less inspired than mine.
“Your first amp,” Shirley said. Mercy’s elbow repaid Shirley’s earlier shoulder nudge. “Annual meeting and potluck. AMP,” Shirley clarified on an intake of breath.
“Yes.”
“That’s nice,” Mercy said. She sounded less happy for me than she did smug, but maybe that was my jaded perception. “Oh, and I’m supposed to tell you that there’s someone who wants to talk to you.” That sounded less smug than it did ominous, but maybe that was the bared teeth in her smile.
“Who?” I stepped back for olfactory comfort. The two of them stepped closer.
“We’ll let you know when we catch up with you later,” Shirley said.
“When there aren’t so many people around,” said Mercy.
Where?
I wondered.
In a dark alley?
Even meeting the twins in the middle of Main Street at high noon in full sun gave me the willies. Then I remembered that I still hadn’t found out who their confidential source was or asked them if they’d seen or learned anything the day they followed Sylvia and Pen. Such as Sylvia and/or Pen stopping by the library. That meant I should try to be pleasant, or at least polite. But if they planned to catch me later, then pleasant or polite could happen later, too.
“Will you excuse me?” I turned my back without waiting for an answer and spotted Thea and Ernestine two tables down, at the dessert end of the spread. Ernestine still wore her Miss Marple tweeds from her afternoon of surveillance in the shop. Thea looked comfortable in jeans and a sweater. Both their ensembles were delightfully accessorized by the bakery boxes emblazoned with Mel’s logo that they held in their hands. Before I reached them, either to see if Thea had information for me or to give her the evil eye, I was waylaid by Granny’s old pirate beau, John Berry.
“Kath, you’re the picture of Ivy’s flower garden.”
I immediately felt appropriately dressed and less like snarling at Thea. John, being of that generation, of course wore a coat and tie.
“I’m sitting with Ardis at the far end of the middle row.” He pointed and I saw Ardis waving from under the basketball hoop at the other end of the gym. “Will you join us? She’s staked a claim to plenty of seats.”
“I’d love to.”
“Good, I’ll see you there. I’m on a mission to round
up enough bodies to fill the rest of the seats. It’s our usual potluck ploy.”
“Ploy?”
He didn’t elaborate, but when I looked over my shoulder toward the twins, he followed my line of sight.
“Ah,” he said, and hurried off in the opposite direction.
In the gym’s far-left corner, beyond the dessert end of the food tables, stood something I hadn’t seen in years—a home-use slide screen. It looked wobbly and frail, its tripod base like the pronged cane of a doddering old man. A laptop sat on a cart in front of the screen, flickering black-and-white pictures on and off the screen. They might have been interesting, but between the warped screen and the gym lights, it was hard to tell. No one watched and no one seemed to care that no one did, so I didn’t, either.
The gym was filling up. People greeted and chatted and laughed. The individual scents of chicken, beans, and rolls disappeared into the delicious swirl of other hot dishes arriving. My skirt and blouse no longer looked out of place in the flow of color and gamut of dress. I smiled and nodded and shook hands on my way over to join Ardis, and I realized this was the largest indoor gathering of people I’d experienced in Blue Plum.
There were five rows of tables running the length of the gym, with chairs down both sides of each long row. That made the seats around the perimeter and the two or three closest to it prime real estate. Reaching the seats in the middle of the cozy arrangement was going to require squeezing sideways, careful juggling of plates and glasses of sweet tea, and a certain amount of apologizing.
I wanted to get over to Ardis before anyone else joined her. We’d stayed busy at the Cat for the rest of the afternoon and I hadn’t been able to ask her if she’d
gotten Debbie to talk while I was at the library. Neither of them had given any clues one way or the other. Debbie hadn’t appeared to be either happily unburdened or more on edge than before and Ardis hadn’t acted as though she was suddenly in possession of key or revelatory facts. It was possible Ardis hadn’t had a chance to talk to Debbie at all.
As I rounded the outside edge of the tables and approached her, Ardis called, “Pocketbook? Hurry.”
Alarmed, I rushed over. “What is it? What do you need?”
“Put it on that empty chair,” she said, pointing four seats into the interior. “You don’t have to sit all the way down there when we eat, but I almost lost that one to the new preacher’s wife a minute ago and I’ve run out of clothes to shed.”
“Did you find out anything from Debbie?”
“That can wait. The chair won’t. Quick.”
I hopped to it, standing behind the valuable chair for good measure, not sure I’d be able to stand up to a preacher or a preacher’s wife with as much authority as Ardis had. Tables around us were filling fast. Only a few people were brave enough to ask Ardis if the other half dozen seats sitting empty between the two of us were taken. Thank goodness John arrived with Ernestine on his arm and Mel, Debbie, and Thea in tow. Ernestine moved down the table and settled into the chair next to me, and Thea into the one next to her. Debbie, Mel, and John took the seats opposite, with John across from Ernestine. Ardis remained standing at the head of the table. That left two chairs empty, the one directly across from me, draped with Ardis’ sweater, and another down at the end next to Thea.
“I think we have an extra seat here,” I called to Ardis. She still concentrated on scanning the crowd and didn’t
answer, but when I suggested to John that he free up the chair by taking Ardis’ sweater from it, she heard and squawked. I sat down, duly chastised.
“Best not let anyone else get hold of that chair,” Ernestine said in my ear. “Ardis has this down to a science.”
“What’s going on?” I asked her. The joviality in the gym was increasing, though, and Ernestine gestured at her own ear. I obliged, leaning closer. “Why does Ardis need a science?”
Ernestine’s eyes glowed. “Factions,” she said. The word popped out of her mouth with such enthusiasm that Ardis, still standing at the end of the table, heard her and nodded approval.
John looked just as keyed up. “The last time I was in town for one of these,” he said, “Evangeline Lavender poured a pitcher of iced tea over Archie Sullivan’s head when he refused to back her side in the Cola War. I can’t believe I’ve allowed myself to miss out on all this since then.”
“It’s just as well, John,” Ernestine said. “You’re a feisty one.”
John slapped the table and hooted in reply.
“Hush,” Ernestine said.
“Cola War?” I looked from one to the other.
John pulled himself together, put a finger to his lips, and shook his head slightly.
“He shouldn’t have brought it up,” Ernestine said. “Bad feelings take so long to die down with some people.”
Clearly Granny had left something out, the times she told me about the Historical Trust Annual Meeting and Potluck. “Social and entertainment highlight of the year” was beginning to sound like a pale euphemism. I looked around with quickened interest, wondering what words
“social” and “entertainment” stood for so politely but with increasingly obvious inadequacy.
Mel, sitting next to John, looked hypervigilant, probably because she’d spiked her short mustard-colored hair straight up for the occasion. But her posture added to the effect. She sat half turned in her seat, with her back toward John and with one ear listening to Debbie. The other ear, from the tilt of her head and the profile I could just see, was intent on a conversation going on at the next table over. I didn’t recognize the couple engaged in that conversation and they didn’t seem aware of Mel listening to them.
John took no offense at Mel’s turned back; he’d turned his toward her. He did a good imitation of a meerkat, sitting tall, neck stretched, eyes moving from person to person down the length of table beyond me. Counting? Looking for someone? Memorizing faces and names?
Ernestine leaned toward Thea to her left. Thea eyed the same conversation Mel was listening to and described the scene for Ernestine, but too quietly for me to hear more than a few words, one of which was either “dimension” or “dementia” and the others “demolition” and “ordnance.” Rethinking it, I hoped that last word was “ordinance” rather than “ordnance.”
Listening out of context in that direction was proving alarming, so I turned to greet the people sitting to my right—but found only backs and shoulders, as they were all looking toward the buffet tables. At first I thought they were poised for a signal so they could jump up and be among the first in the buffet lines. I was tempted to subliminally steer them toward my spinach salad by softly whistling “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man.” Then I leaned far enough to the side to see around the back next to me and got a clear view down the middle of the
table to the floor show my tablemates were watching—Shirley and Mercy wrestling with a stand-up microphone.
It was hard to tell what the twins were trying to do to, for, or with the microphone—adjust the height was my best guess. It was also hard to tell if they had any competency for the task or any business touching the equipment, although it appeared to be dawning on the irritated woman waiting to use it that they had neither. When things looked darkest, Angela appeared. It would take longer to describe what she wore than it did for her to separate the twins from the microphone, twist and adjust unseen parts of the microphone’s pole, move it over in front of the waiting woman, and slide from view. She did all that without appearing to make eye contact or saying a word. Because of my tunnel vision down the table of transfixed guests, I couldn’t tell where she’d appeared from or returned to.
For the record, Angie wore black jeans and a tight, low-cut pink tank top. It was the shade of pink that was my new least favorite color.