“Please feel free to take a sample. I’ve just started selling. The company I work for is the Mary Kay of freeze-dried fruits and vegetables. It’s the wave of the future, with terrorists and all.” The woman speaking at my elbow was slightly pudgy, about forty-five, in colorfully striped glasses and a black pantsuit.
She pried open one of the plastic containers to reveal a shriveled collection of dead things. A pea, a banana slice, a bit of carrot. I think I recognized a strawberry. And there was something brown and unrecognizable, like a tiny tick.
“They’ve got a shelf life of ten years. You soak them in water and they jump right back to life.” She picked up a nearby jar of
water floating with small objects that looked like something drained out of the garbage disposal. “Would you like a taste?”
“Tammy, I think Letty said she’d give you a few minutes to make your pitch at the
end
of the service, right? Do you even know this woman’s name?” My rescuer, a schoolteacherish sort, placed her body between Tammy and me, like she was setting a basketball pick, and stuck out her hand. “I’m Letty’s cousin, Lee Ann Womack.”
“You always try to control everything, Lee Ann,” Tammy whined.
“I’m Emily Page, the new chief’s wife.” I thought it might ease things to finally interject. “Nice to meet you both.” This was a new thing for me, identifying myself by my husband’s career, and I had no idea why in the hell I was doing it.
Tammy nodded, irritated, and stalked off. Lee Ann guided me to the center of the family room, where I was instantly mesmerized by the giant wedding portrait of Letty and Harry over the fireplace. Squint a little, and they morphed into Cameron Diaz and Hugh Jackman.
“It’s a shock the first time you see it. You can’t believe it’s her, right? Well, it’s her. Put the bitchy personality you know with that face and body up there, draw on a cheerleader uniform, and you’ll pretty much have a picture of what I had to face every day in high school, not to mention all the torturous Easter dinners. But life’s a wicked little bastard. I got my master’s in library science from Harvard and she got Harry and an addiction to high fructose corn syrup.”
Before I could figure out my response to that, screeching feedback from the microphone outside sliced through the room like a dying cat. I plugged my right ear with a finger, because I held the wineglass in the other hand and there was no immediate place to put it down. Letty was visible through the open door to the patio, decked out in black evening pants and a black sequined
top. She was teetering on seven-inch heels gallantly struggling to support her body mass. She grabbed the podium and thumped the microphone with her finger, making things worse, which seemed to be her self-assigned role in life.
“Ladies! Please be seated so we can begin.” The pianist hustled to work on the microphone, and in a few seconds worked it down to a soft, bee-like buzz.
The women streamed expectantly to the patio, a herd of clomping, designer heels. Caroline couldn’t have planned the drama better herself. Two young Mexican women at each of the double French doors handed us programs with a fifteen-year-old glamour shot of Caroline on the front along with her date of birth and death. High-gloss paper. Raised, gold type. Caroline was only fifty-two. She seemed so much older. The matriarch. The Queen.
I sat in the first open chair I came to, on the aisle on the far side of the pool, and quickly glanced inside the program. Letty had listed me as the fourth and last speaker. Emily Page, Wife of the Police Chief. I tried to tamp down my irritation. This was printed way before she ever picked up the phone to invite me.
My only consolation: The program listed Gretchen Liesel as Primary Eulogist. Maybe she’d run over her time limit. Maybe she’d inspire something in me. I had no idea what I was going to say. I didn’t recognize the names of the other two speakers. Letty planned to sing a solo to close things out. “I’ll Fly Away.” I had a feeling it would no longer be one of my favorite gospel hymns by the time the evening shut down.
“We are here to mourn our great friend Caroline Warwick.” Letty’s voice boomed across the yard. “Let us open with a moment of silence.” The crowd bowed their heads low.
“Hey, Letty,” someone called from the back. “We hear that Caroline found out you aren’t really descended from the General.”
“That is a lie,” Letty said calmly, head still bowed. “This is not an appropriate place to talk about things like how you blew my husband at my daughter’s middle-school prom.”
“Show some respect, y’all,” urged the tall woman sitting directly in front of me. “Take your bitch fight to Twitter, where it belongs.” She turned around and whispered to me, “This is why Yankees like you think Texans are lunatics.”
“I don’t think that at all,” I murmured.
I just think Clairmont women are lunatics
.
The crowd was babbling, moving in their chairs like restless hyenas. All those secrets, ready to explode. Caroline’s real legacy.
Gretchen hopped up out of her chair in the front row. She nudged Letty away from the microphone, quickly adjusting it, turning it down.
“Thank you, Letty.” She stared at her pointedly. Letty hesitated. Then she tottered away from the podium, back to her chair. “Everybody
sit
down.
Shut up
.”
And they did. By the time Gretchen finished her tribute, tears and $35 mascara ran down the faces around me. Women shared tissues from their purses. Gretchen’s story about a philanthropist and dear friend who never wanted credit were hard to square with the Caroline Warwick I knew. Not a peep about her being seriously psychotic. I had to wonder whether half of these women were crying out of relief that their secrets might die with her.
Gretchen rolled on for about half an hour. After that, Letty announced that the next two speakers on the program hadn’t shown. I wish I’d known that was an option.
“Next up is Emily Page, wife of our new police chief, who will share a few thoughts about Caroline and then she will update us on the tragic case.”
Shock, a little panic, followed by full-blown anger. No way could I offer up inside information on the murder. The murderer was possibly in the house.
I wanted to squeeze Letty’s neck with my hands until her chubby head popped off. Instead, I stepped haltingly up to the podium as Letty brushed by me in a wave of thick, flowery perfume, sat down, and peered up at me expectantly, as did forty other faces.
I glanced down at my program, pretending that I was refreshing myself on notes that didn’t exist. Then I gazed deliberately at each section of the crowd. Left, right, center, silently acknowledging them, a trick I learned in my high school speech class. Take a moment to possess yourself. Make them feel like you have a relationship with each one of them. I wondered whether my eyes had passed over Caroline’s killer.
I didn’t see Misty’s face out there. Or Holly’s or Tiffany’s, for that matter. I easily spotted Lucinda in the far back corner, hiding under a black floppy hat, which only made her stand out more.
“First,” I said, “I am unable to speak about the case. I think it would be … inappropriate on several levels.” Letty made a small, regurgitating sound. “I would, however, like to share a prayer I’ve always found a comfort to me. I am Catholic, and I know many of you are Baptist, but I think it is universal. Please bow your heads.”
Everyone immediately bowed their heads. The power of the podium in the Bible Belt.
It wasn’t hard to find this one lodged in my brain.
“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee we do cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen.”
“Amen,” the crowd repeated.
I sat down. Letty seemed stunned. This appeal to the Lord wasn’t the big Hollywood finish she was expecting. But she was
Letty, so she recovered quickly. She picked up a portable microphone resting at her feet on the ground, cued the pianist, and proceeded to blast out “I’ll Fly Away.”
Not as awful as I thought she’d be in a full-out performance. The pitch roamed a little beyond her reach, but she was at least on key and clearly had voice training.
She made the mistake in the first chorus of thinking the crowd was with her. She began to wander the aisles like a nightclub singer, sticking the microphone in people’s confused faces for them to sing along before yanking it away a second later and yelling for everyone to clap along.
Letty’s face glowed red-hot from her vocal effort and her anger at our lackluster participation as she bobbled around in her shiny sequins and skyscraper heels. She walked unsteadily back toward the podium, singing Tammy Wynette–style about God’s celestial shore. She almost made it.
A few steps from the podium, her left heel caught on the leg of an empty chair. She flapped her arms desperately in that moment before disaster, when you can see it coming but can’t stop it.
Gravity and about 250 pounds gave way, and Letty flopped backward into the pool like a human Shamu, taking four empty chairs with her. The splash soaked mourners sitting on the periphery of the water, who immediately let out shrieks, and at least one very loud “Fuck!”
It might have been just a medium-sized disaster if, while Letty’s head bobbed above the water, one of the passing votives hadn’t caught her hair on fire.
I found myself at the side of the pool, leaping. For the half second I was suspended in mid-air, I wondered how my life had come to this. Then I hit the water—no small splash, either.
“Your hair is on fire!” I was yelling, reaching for Letty’s head, dunking it under.
Her head popped up.
“Are you trying to drown me?” she screeched.
The fire was out. The left side of her hair was singed all the way to the scalp, with a splotch of skin turning newborn baby pink. She’d been lucky. The rest of her head had been too wet to light up. But Letty had at least six months of hair recovery in front of her.
I felt a diabolical urge to dunk her again, saying,
No, no, your hair is still on fire, Letty
, and then again and again, letting her bob up and down, until it stopped being funny.
I
t turned out that the two Mexican women who handed out the programs, Juanita and Lupe, had suffered in Letty’s domestic service for the last ten years.
With Letty’s grudging permission, Juanita dug into the back of her mistress’s walk-in closet to find the smallest-sized clothing she owned, which turned out to be a lavender velour tracksuit in a size 16. It was wonderfully loose and cozy, and made me completely rethink my snotty attitude about velour.
Meanwhile, Lupe wrung out my clothes and hung them over several of the chairs outside. She then delivered a cup of hot cinnamon tea, which I sipped while Gretchen pumped up a blood pressure cuff on my arm, which she’d retrieved from her bag in the car.
After Gretchen briefly examined Letty’s scalp and recommended a temporary fix of over-the-counter cortisone cream, Letty disappeared into the back wing of the house. The last of the guests were trickling out the front door.
“I’m glad you are delivering my baby,” I said to Gretchen, moving over on the couch to make more room for her. “You seem calm in an emergency.”
“You’re the one who jumped in to save the day.”
“Instincts. Wife of a cop. Former junior lifeguard.”
“Your blood pressure is good.” Gretchen stripped off the Velcro, sounding curt. “Do you understand what the words
avoid stress
mean?”
It seemed rhetorical, so I didn’t answer. And while I had Gretchen’s attention, I meant to take full advantage. “Did you know that the cops are going through files that Caroline kept on all of you?”
“I thought we were done with this conversation. But yes, rumors are all over town that cops are picking our lives apart. I never saw the file room, but I had a general idea. I thought of it as a fairly harmless hobby.”
“Did you know she snooped around your house and found the Nazi uniform?”
“You don’t give up, do you? Yes, she eventually told me. That uniform left our house years ago. We donated it to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. How did you find this out anyway? Is your husband letting you read the files?”
“No,” I said, sharply. “Definitely not.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t think Caroline’s motives were all that pure. I told you in your office that someone left a package on my doorstep. It was the police report from the night I was raped in college.”
Gretchen’s face remained impassive.
“Her husband and son are still alive.” Now I was just throwing darts at the wall.
No reaction.
“You knew,” I said.
“I know that Caroline didn’t deserve to die the way she did.”
“Do you have any idea who hated her this much?”
“No.” She snapped her black medical bag shut and spoke gently. “Caroline wouldn’t taunt you about a rape. You’re the victim. Whatever her methods, she was all about
helping
the victim.”
“Hi, y’all.” Letty’s voice rang out cheerfully behind us, like this awful evening was just another day in the life.
She plopped beside me on the couch, the leather cushion offering up a helpless sigh. The yellow smiley faces on her flannel pajamas beamed at me. She wore a matching blue facial mask that cracked a little, like a series of mini-earthquakes, every time her mouth moved. She’d stuck a SpongeBob Band-Aid on the left side of her forehead and tucked her hair into a clear pink plastic shower cap.
“Did I hear y’all talking about that little package I left on Emily’s doorstep a while back? By the way, I’m going to want that outfit back tomorrow before noon. I think I’m close to fitting back into it.”
She patted the shower cap on her head distractedly.
“What are y’all staring at? I’m giving myself one of those Queen Helene Cholesterol Hot Oil Treatments from Walgreens. It’s an old pageant-girl trick. My hair’s under a lot of stress.”