Matchpoint (17 page)

“No more hiding under beds, all right?” he said, bringing me back to reality.

“Well …,” I started.

“Well what?”

“About this cult. I mean, what do you have to do with them? Are you a member like Dr. Dulur?”

“No, I’m not.”

“So, how do you know the leader?” I asked.

“Gladie, I’m not prepared to get into this with you.”

“Who are you prepared to get into it with? Becky?”

Holden put his finger under my chin and tilted up my face. “No more hiding under beds. Stay away from the cult. I mean it, stay away. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

I didn’t ask him how getting close to the cult would hurt me. And I didn’t tell him about Rosalie. I didn’t have a lot to say. Instead, I did a lot of thinking. Holden took my hand and walked me home, and the entire time I thought. I thought about Holden trying to stay away from me. I thought about the creepy cult and Dr. Dulur being one of them. I thought of Dr. Dulur as the sadistic dentist. I thought about a pretty woman named Becky and Holden’s desperation to find her. I thought about Holden telling me to shut up.

When we got back to the house, Grandma was waiting for me outside. “There you are,” she said to me. “You’re late. Say goodbye to Arthur. You’re needed inside.”

I started to walk up the driveway, but Holden took my hand and pulled me close.

“Are we good, you and I?” he asked me.

“Yes.” But I wasn’t sure about that.

“Are you sure? I want us to be good.” He said it like he was used to getting what he wanted. It was another side of Holden, a side I wasn’t used to.

“Gladie needs to come inside now,” Grandma said a little forcibly to Holden. “She has work to do.”

Holden let go of me, and I walked up the driveway, looking back at him a couple times. “You’ve had a complicated day,” Grandma said when I reached her. “It’s
time to be inside. Promise me you’ll stay inside the rest of the day.”

“I promise, Grandma.” She handed me a Pop-Tart and walked with me into the house.

With all the excitement, I had missed lunch, but Grandma had thought of that. “I’ve got fried chicken and mashed potatoes,” Grandma told me as we walked inside. “Don’t worry about you know who and that lunch situation. I took care of it.”

I had almost forgotten about you know who. I wondered where he was in the No-Face Case investigation. I had been racking up suspects all day long. Between Rosalie and Spencer’s other loony lady friends, Rosalie and the other parents of children the dentist allegedly abused, people opposed to Dr. Dulur’s membership in the cult, and the cult itself, there were more than a few directions to go.

I made a beeline for the kitchen, but I was stopped dead in my tracks by Grandma’s visitors in the parlor. Sister Cyril, the nun who ran the women’s shelter outside of town, sat there and stared at another woman, who stood in the center of the room.

There wasn’t anything odd about the standing woman except for the fact she was topless, and Sister Cyril was inspecting her boobs. “Will you look at those,” exclaimed Sister Cyril.

“Yvonne Richardson just got a new pair, and we are admiring them,” Grandma informed me. “Grab a plate and join us.”

“I think I’ll just eat in the kitchen,” I said. I wasn’t a big fan of other women’s breasts.

“No, join us. I want Yvonne to talk to you.”

I couldn’t imagine why Grandma wanted me to look at someone’s fake knockers, but it was the most normal part of my day.

I piled a plate high with fried chicken, mashed potatoes,
and gravy. I took Bird’s Chinese diet tea out of my purse and brewed a cup. I took a sip. It wasn’t bad. It tasted like regular tea with a hint of licorice. I brought my plate and cup into the parlor, joined the women, and got an eyeful of boob.

“Yvonne, this is my granddaughter, Gladie.”

“Nice to meet you,” Yvonne said, completely unconcerned to be naked in front of a perfect stranger. And a nun. And an old-lady matchmaker.

“Uh … nice to meet you, too. Nice to see you, Sister,” I said, happy to turn my attention to Sister Cyril. “I didn’t see you at the Christmas pageant.”

“Christmas in December is plenty for me,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” Grandma said, sitting down. “That fool mayor just ran after his donkey into the lake, and he got kicked in the head. Kicked in the head by a donkey … maybe it will be an improvement.”

Nobody asked how Grandma could know that. Instead I wondered if the mayor could still go out with Belinda even if he had a concussion or worse. That is, if Belinda ever showed up again.

Grandma threw me a look and tsked.

“I know,” I told her. “But it’s just one date until I can find someone suitable for her.”

“Cutting corners just makes a lot of weird shapes,” Grandma said. “It never helped anyone in the long run. You know better. You’ve got the gift. You are a born matchmaker.”

I sighed. Grandma was convinced I had the gift and was just like her, but I thought the only thing we had in common was our metabolism.

She clapped her hands together. “Okay, Yvonne, now that you have the jugs out, I want you to tell Gladie what you were telling me earlier. The hooters are part of the story,” Grandma explained to me.

“Should I start from the beginning?” Yvonne asked,
cupping her large silicone breasts like she was holding on to them for balance.

“That would be fine,” Grandma said. “You might as well give her the full rundown.”

Yvonne took a seat facing me and crossed her legs. She studied me a moment, perhaps wondering if I could handle a story that started with big, naked hooters sitting in my grandmother’s favorite parlor chair. It was hard to look her in the eyes; my focus kept drifting south.

“Last year, I was an obese spinster with a job as a janitor at Lou’s auto mechanic place. You know the one?” she asked.

I nodded, but I was transfixed by her boobs, which inflated and deflated with her breath.

“I had had enough. While I was sweeping up at Lou’s and eating Mallomars, a show was playing on the TV in the waiting room. It was that one where all the different professionals get somebody on, tell them they are ugly, fat, and don’t know how to dress, and then change them. So, you know what I thought?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Focus, Gladie,” Grandma said. “They’re just breasts.”

“So, you know what I thought?” Yvonne repeated. “You know, about that show?”

I knew the show she was talking about. They made women lose ten pounds, shoved them into uncomfortable clothes, added fake hair, and smeared on a lot of makeup. It gave me hives. “No, what did you think?” I asked.

“I thought, ‘This is the show for me.’ I was about to call the producers and ask if I could get on the next episode when Lou’s phone rang, and guess who was on the other line?” Yvonne snapped her fingers. “Gladie? Are you with me?”

The boob thing was getting to me. I didn’t understand why she had to be naked the entire time, unless she was trying to get her money’s worth, showing the world the
whole enchilada instead of the normal amount of ample cleavage other breast-implant recipients liked to display.

I was obsessed with her nudity. My mind tried to make sense of it. Would she leave the house this way, completely topless? Would she drive around with a boob perilously close to the steering wheel? What if she had to make a U-turn? I hoped she wasn’t a coffee drinker. I hoped she didn’t order soup at dinner. It was dangerous being a nudist.

“I’ll tell you who was on the phone,” Yvonne continued, tired of waiting for me to answer. “Your grandma. She said if I wished, she would give me a makeover. Like she knew, you know. Like she knew.”

“I remember that,” Sister Cyril piped in. “It was like watching a disappearing act. You lost all that weight, you changed your appearance from top to bottom. It was almost a miracle.”

Grandma blushed. I guess she liked being called a miracle worker. “But the new breasts weren’t my idea,” she pointed out. “She had perfectly respectable B’s.” I looked down. I was a solid C cup, but Yvonne was currently topping double-D status. Easily.

“No, I did that on my own,” Yvonne said. “It was a bad idea. ’Cause I wanted them cheap, you know?”

I nodded. “Your boobs don’t look cheap to me. You know, not that I’m looking or anything.”

“These?” she said, cupping them high and pointing her nipples at me like they were going to shoot out daggers, just like in a James Bond movie. “These aren’t the cheap ones. These are the new, expensive ones.”

“Tell her who was with you at the cheap place getting her own cheap body parts,” Grandma prompted.

“Holly Firestone,” Yvonne said. “Holly Firestone got a huge deal from the doctor because she bought in bulk and because she did the doctor favors, if you know what I mean.”

I wasn’t surprised a bit. In fact, it wasn’t anything I didn’t suspect already about Holly the hygienist. I ate a forkful of mashed potatoes and leaned back.

“Tell her the rest about Holly,” Grandma urged Yvonne.

“She and I bonded,” Yvonne explained. “That was before, you know, when her face still moved. When I told her I was looking to change careers, she said she had a sweet job at Bliss Dental. You know why, Gladie? Can you guess?”

“Free dental work?” I asked.

“In a manner of speaking. Holly was cooking the books, skimming off the top.”

I leaned forward. “Are you sure?”

“She told me.”

“She told you at the plastic surgeon’s office that she was stealing from Bliss Dental?”

“No, she told me that later when we were drinking Harvey Wallbangers at Bar None. She said she was saving up to buy a Camaro and later she was going to get a nice condo in Houston, where she had family.”

“Tell what happened after that,” Sister Cyril said excitedly. “Tell her about the Pilates.”

“So, I take my cheap boobs to Pilates class, and I had a little incident.”

Sister Cyril bounced up and down in her chair. “Gladie, one of Yvonne’s cheap mammaries was sucked up into her chest cavity when she was doing a Pilates exercise.”

I swallowed and then raised an eyebrow. I had so many questions, I didn’t know where to start. There was the obvious how-do-boobs-get-sucked-into-chest-cavities question, edged out only by the is-that-how-a-nun-says-tatas question.

“My hand to God,” Sister Cyril said. “I was in the same class when it happened. One minute she was completely
symmetrical and the next minute,
whoop!
” she exclaimed, making a loud sucking noise. “Her right side was gone.”

“Holy crap,” I said.

“I had to go to the hospital,” explained Yvonne.

“She married the EMT who drove the ambulance,” Grandma said with a twinkle in her eye.

“Yep,” Yvonne said, flashing me a huge ring. “Zelda had set up the Pilates class for me. It was painful, but I wouldn’t trade Paul for anything. He paid for these new ones, and they are guaranteed not to get sucked up into my body.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “I should probably go upstairs and do some work.” I was developing a boob-inspired migraine, and I wanted to tell Spencer that Holly was the one embezzling from Bliss Dental.

“Wait, Gladie,” Grandma said. “Yvonne, tell her the rest. Tell her the important part.”

“About Dr. Dulur?”

“Yes.”

Yvonne leaned back and tried to fold her arms in front of her, but her boobs got in the way, so she dropped them to her sides. “When I was in the hospital after they dug my boob out, I stayed in a room with a crazy woman. She told me she had been chosen by aliens. She was part of this cult, the cult the wackos belong to over here, you know?” I nodded. “Anyway, at some point during the day, Dr. Dulur came in and visited her. They closed the curtains for privacy, but of course I could hear every word.”

My head was throbbing. “Yeah, the leader of the cult told me that Dr. Dulur was a member.”

“Oh, yeah?” Yvonne said dramatically. “Did he tell you he was battling him for leadership?”

“Gladie,” Grandma said. “Dr. Dulur was number two, and he was trying to be number one.”

FOR A moment, I forgot about Yvonne’s knockers, and I had a flashback to Dr. Dulur’s smiling face, telling me joyfully that I had a mouth full of cavities. But his face had changed in my mind from that of the happy, disco-loving dentist to one that fit a sadistic, power-hungry cult member. He was almost the man of a thousand faces, I realized, and suddenly the murderer’s grisly act made sense to me. What better statement to make than to remove his face?