If I had any other choice, Maye told herself, I would take it. If I knew of anyone else around here who has lived in Spaulding as long as Cynthia’s husband, I’d knock on that front door instead. I need to get this story and there is no other way, she said to herself again, and maybe Mr. McMahon would be happy to have some company. If it looks like I’m bothering him, I’ll just give him the gift and leave.
Maye reached up and knocked on the door, and after several seconds she heard some shuffling from behind it. As the door opened, the notes of Artie Shaw’s “Moonglow” drifted into the hallway from a back room.
“Hiya, Maye,” Pat McMahon said with a smile. “How have you been? Did you get your peanuts recycled all right?”
“Oh, fine, thank you,” she said as her neighbor motioned for her to come in. “And you? I hope you didn’t have to wait too long on line.”
“Oh, no, Elsie just piled that Renegade of hers up with bags and boxes and even attached a little trailer to the back of it that she usually uses to pull her dogs, grandkids, or oxygen tanks in,” Pat said. “By the time I got there, she was at the front of the line.”
“This is for you,” Maye said holding up the orchid with pure white blossoms on a long, elegant stem. “If there is a flower that personifies Cynthia, it would have to be exquisite. I saw this one yesterday, and it reminded me of her.”
“That’s so nice,” he said, taking it from Maye and admiring its flawless, snow-colored blooms. “She would have loved it.”
Maye smiled. “At Cynthia’s memorial service, you mentioned that you met her in high school,” she began. “And I was wondering if I could ask you some questions about Spaulding’s history. You know Cynthia agreed to sponsor me for this year’s Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant, and now, with her passing, I’m not sure if I’ll go on to compete without her.”
“Oh, she’d want you to,” Pat said, nodding vigorously. “She loved that celebration and the contest. She would want you to go on. She may have only held the title for a year, but Cynthia was a Sewer Pipe Queen for her whole life. Have you found another sponsor yet?”
“No,” Maye said. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I went to the library to do some research, but I have no way of knowing what their names are now, if they’re still in Spaulding, or if they’ve—”
“Run into the white light,” Pat finished.
Maye nodded. “There was one in particular that I was hoping you’d know something about,” she added carefully. “From the newspaper clippings, it looked like she was a Spaulding favorite and would be the perfect sponsor. But I can’t seem to find anything about her at all, and the clerk at the Records Office gave me some odd story about City Hall burning down, if you can believe that!”
“Oh, but it did,” Pat confirmed. “City Hall went up, the movie theater went up, the hardware store was gone, and even Spaulding Sewer Pipe got a match to it. That was a bad summer. You won’t get too many people ready to talk about that. Besides, it’s all back to the way it was, can’t even tell—even I forget most of the time. That summer is all over with. No need to think about it again.”
“Oh,” Maye said. “I thought the clerk was lying to get out of trying to help me.”
“Nope,” he said, taking a seat on the couch exactly where Maye had sat during the afternoon tea. “She was right. Now, who’s this lady you’re trying to find?”
“Her name was Ruby Spicer,” Maye started. “She was the Sewer Pipe Queen decades ago. And except for those clippings, I can’t find anything on her. She was never listed in the phone book, and now the records really are all gone.”
Pat looked at Maye and nodded slowly, then reached for his pipe on the side table next to the couch.
“She was young, I don’t know how old, but she had dark, wavy hair, shoulder-length. She seemed short, even tiny, almost,” Maye continued, hoping her description would trigger something in Pat’s memory. “Her eyes were very big, but also quite soft-looking, and she was just incredibly—”
“Beautiful,” Pat finished for Maye as he lit the pipe and sucked on the tip several times to get it going. “Marvelously beautiful.”
“You know who I’m talking about?” Maye asked, seeing the first spark of hope in her search. “You knew Ruby Spicer?”
“Of course,” he said, exhaling a ring of smoke. “This was a small town then, even smaller than it is now. Everybody knew everybody. Ruby was a nice girl, very kind, very sweet. And she was a looker, I tell you. Looked just like Rita Hayworth but prettier. But she had a mind of her own, that gal. She was a firecracker, I tell you. A redhead.”
“What happened to her?” Maye asked, trying to tone down her excitement. “Do you know where she is? Is she still in Spaulding? According to anyone I’ve talked to about her, she just vanished.”
“Yep,” Pat agreed. “That’s about what happened. I don’t know where she went. One day she was just gone, right in the middle of her year as queen. What about some of the other Old Queens? There are plenty of them rattling around here.”
“But,” Maye began, hoping that wasn’t all he knew, “did she get married, did she move away? I mean, all of a sudden, she was just gone? A girl that everyone knew? A girl that everyone liked? And no one knows what happened to her?”
“Aw, Maye,” Pat said with a small chuckle. “This was a small town back then, a really small town. A pretty girl like that saw a way out to a bigger life and took it, that’s all. I don’t know why she left, but it’s not something a bunch of people in Spaulding back then wish they hadn’t done themselves.”
“And she never came back to visit? No one kept in touch with her? She had no ties back here at all?” Maye asked.
Pat shook his head. “Even if she did come back to town, her folks lived miles outside of town by Crawford Lake—not much reason to go by there. Bad fishing, hard to get to, the road still hasn’t been paved out there. People come, people go. Do you know what happened to the people you went to high school with, except for good friends?”
“No,” Maye said, seeing his point.
“Well, there you go,” Pat concluded. “Now go on out there and find yourself another Old Queen.”
“And you don’t remember anything else about her disappearance?” Maye asked in one final effort.
“I wouldn’t call it a disappearance as much as I’d call it leaving,” he said with a smile. “Now, I just bought some donuts from the organic bakery, that Hoo Doo Donuts place. Would you like one?”
Maye smiled back. She couldn’t bear another tragedy on her hands.
“I’d love one,” she said.
Maye heard the car pull into the driveway and got up quickly to unlock the front door. As she turned the bolt, she looked out to see him getting the toolbox out of the back of his car.
He had fallen for the bait.
Well, that’s a bit dramatic, Maye thought. The bathroom sink was really broken, sort of. In a way.
She had been standing in front of it washing her face the night before, rubbing at particularly stubborn jelly donut spots on her chin, neck, and cheek, when she had the most magnificent revelation after eating several of the best donuts she had ever had at Pat’s. So good and happy she felt almost light-headed, quite possibly teetering on the verge of a sugar-induced coma. She was not ready to abandon the mystery of Ruby Spicer. Not just yet. And now she had a plan.
“Charlie!” Maye yelled for her husband, who was apparently too busy being a victim of Selective Man Deafness to answer.
She decided to try a more direct approach.
“Charlie!” she screamed this time. “Charlie, oh my God! The sink is backing up! It’s filling up with water! It won’t drain! Help, Charlie, help!”
Within a second, Maye heard his size-thirteen feet flopping against the pine stairs. It sounded like buffalo pounding down the prairie.
“Charlie, hurry!” she called as she let the water flow over the basin rim and dribble onto the floor. “Help me, Charlie, help! It’s overflowing!??
?
Charlie burst into the bathroom with a wrench in his hand, ready to save his family from certain danger.
“Do something!” Maye egged him on as the water began to puddle at her feet. “Charlie, it’s flooding!”
He pushed Maye out of the way and immediately went to work on the bathroom main with his wrench instead of simply turning off the faucet, which Maye gingerly did when he wasn’t looking.
Her husband studied the pipe, looked down the drain, and stuck his finger into it as far as it would go, undoubtedly pushing the little wad of toilet paper Maye had stuffed in there down even farther. After he waited for the sink basin to drain, he attacked the pipes with vigor, and within six minutes and after breaking a sweat worthy of a woman giving birth, he had a chrome pipe puzzle on his hands that rivaled the difficulty of getting Pakistan to have lunch with India.
“It’s okay, honey,” she said after he had spent a good hour trying to fit the pieces together again. “But we have two choices here: you could e-mail Norm or I could help you fix it.”
“Fine,” Charlie said, throwing down his wrench. “Call your cop. And remember to ask him about Bueno Gusto. I found a questionable hair and what looked like a tooth in my fajita wrap the other day.”
So, armed with an ulterior motive, Maye opened the door as John Smith trudged through it, his toolbox in his right hand and the answers that Maye needed locked away somewhere in that brain of his.
He nearly gasped when he saw the mess on the bathroom floor.
“It’s a massacre in here,” he said, scooping up the pipes gently. “And I certainly recognize the signature of the lunatic who did this. I believe he also bludgeoned your kitchen pipes into a coma, did he not?”
“He did,” Maye affirmed. “But he thought he ate a fajita tooth at Bueno Gusto yesterday, so he was a little unnerved. What’s the prognosis on this?”
“Hundred and fifty bucks,” he answered. “And tell him he’s lucky if a tooth is all he ate at that place. I once saw them serve something that looked like it was blinking.”
“Speaking of husbands,” she added, “my next one is going to be an orphan and a plumber.”
Maye went into the kitchen, got a plate and a napkin, and returned to the bathroom to witness a yeastier, doughier version of plumber’s crack, this one more potent because the plumber was also a cop with a Hoo Doo hankering.
“Boston crème,” she said before she took a bite, “is my favorite.”
John Smith slowly turned around. “Whatcha got there?” he asked.
“Just a little donut,” she said. “Have you ever had the Boston crème from the organic bakery?”
“Ooooh, you mean Hoo Doo Donuts?” John asked, tackling the pipes. “No, I’ve never had that one. Those run out early! It looks good.”
“Well, they use this French vanilla custard made from scratch with fresh cream,” Maye explained slowly. “And then they drizzle a Belgian chocolate glaze on top. They’re incredible. I’ve never had a donut like it. I don’t even mind the fourth chin I just sprouted because of it, it’s that good.”
“It sounds pretty yummy,” John said, fitting the plumbing pieces together expertly. “And the kitchen in the Hoo Doo is so clean you could do DNA testing in there.”
“Very good to know!” Maye said, taking another bite. “What’s your favorite kind of donut?”
John grinned. “Jelly,” he said.
“Strawberry or raspberry?”
“Both.” He laughed. “But I shouldn’t. I’m watching my weight. It’s getting hard to bend over, and I got a strange rash the last time I had to chase a perp.”
“Pffft!” Maye pooh-poohed him. “They’re organic! And besides, your luck is incredible. You should buy a lottery ticket on the way home, because have I got something for you! And about the rash—bike shorts are God’s secret little miracle for donut lovers like us.”
Maye disappeared, and after a moment she popped back into the bathroom—now perfectly reassembled with the wad of toilet paper resting on the soap dish—with a plate holding two jelly donuts, one strawberry, one raspberry.
“Thank you!” he said with wide, Hoo Doo eyes, then dug into one.
“How about some coffee?” Maye asked, and John, his mouth occupied with the donut, nodded vigorously. “Come on, come into the kitchen.”
John followed Maye into the kitchen, where she put a hot cup of coffee and a box of donuts on the table of the breakfast nook.
“Hoo Doo donuts make me…happy,” he said as Maye slid into the bench across from him.
“Have another one,” Maye said as she placed another circle of love, a custard-filled, on his plate before he could protest. “So, John, tell me, why are you a cop and a plumber?”
“Well,” he managed to get out in between mouthfuls. “I’m a plumber because I can charge you a hundred fifty bucks to put some pipes back together and I can’t charge you a hundred fifty when I find out who stole your bike. I solve problems in both of my jobs, but one bought me a small fishing boat and the other one makes me feel like I’m doing something. My dad was a policeman in Spaulding, so far back that there weren’t any radios then, you know. There was just a tall, red light in the center of town, right in the town square, and when that thing flashed, all the officers knew to get to a phone ASAP and call in to find out what was going on. He loved helping people and keeping them safe, so I kind of wanted to carry on the tradition, you know?”
“Was there really a red light in the town square?” Maye asked, intrigued. “I’ve never seen it. Is it still there?”
“Nah,” John said, finishing off another donut as Maye slid yet another onto his plate. “The light was on top of a tall pine pole. It burned the same night City Hall did, but no one knew it because it burned before it could even be turned on.”
He took another bite as powder grazed his nose, making him look like he just stepped out of the restroom at Bungalow 8.
“The department got radio communication equipment after that night, you bet,” he continued. “Whole town changed after that night. Well, not really, I mean, it looks the same now as it did then, but you know, when your town burns down, things are bound to turn.”
Maye nodded. “I found out about City Hall when I was trying to do research for a project,” Maye replied. “Before that, I had no idea. The building looked old, it smelled old, it certainly fooled me. How did it catch fire?”
John took another bite and shrugged. “I was a kid,” he said, chewing. “But it just did. Everything here is built of wood, we’re in the middle of the forest. Doesn’t take much to get a spark going, especially in the summer.”
“Didn’t a lot of things burn down that year, though?” Maye questioned. “That seems kind of odd. The movie theater, the hardware store, the pipe factory?”
“Could have been a dry year,” John said as he plucked a cruller out of the box. “A cigarette butt and some dry weeds is all it takes sometimes. Rumor had it that a rival pipe company took a match to everything to drive our factory out of business. Is it hot in here?”
“I don’t feel warm,” Maye commented. “Probably all of this fire talk. But that sounds like quite a story. For such a small town, Spaulding is full of stories.”
“Yeah,” the plumber cop said, finally beginning to slow down after eating more than half the box—approximately 2,170 calories, 260 grams of carbs, including 125 grams of sugar, 119 grams of fat, and absolutely no protein value. In a moment or two, he would be riding the best sugar high money could buy, because even though Hoo Doo donuts were organic, a Hoo Doo donut without a substantial amount of sugar, albeit pesticide-free, would be a lonely, out-of-business, chapter 11 donut.
“Oh,” John professed, “I feel a little dizzy, but these donuts are so good. They are the best donuts. THE BEST DONUTS! Dude, like, you don’t even know! No WAY, they’re so good! So, now—wait, what did you say? Hee hee hee.”
“I said ‘Spaulding is full of stories,’” Maye repeated.
“It is,” John said, giggling, his face flushing a little as the charging wall of sugar entered his bloodstream. “I feel like I’m flying! Do you feel that? Hee hee hee. If I was a bird, I’d be a…scrub jay. So pretty. Pretty little scrub jay! No! No! I’d be a heron! I’d be a heron so this way I could still fish. How would I drive my boat, though, if I was a heron? Could wings drive? Oh, that’s funny. A heron driving a boat! Hee hee hee. Dude. Have you been there the whole time?”
Maye nodded. “Tell me some stories, John,” she coaxed. “Tell me some Spaulding stories.”
“In fourth grade I ate a Sloppy Joe too fast and threw it up all over my desk and it got all over my teacher’s shoes. We never ate Sloppy Joes again in school after that.”
“That’s funny.” She smiled. “How about another one? What about the story of Ruby Spicer?”
“She was pretty,” John slurred as he chewed. “Ruby Spicer was prettier than a scrub jay, but she was a spitfire. She left town, though. She had to, she didn’t have a choice. My dad, he gave me a dog he got from her. He liked her, said we needed to be nice to her. I love that dog, Rocky. He’s a good ole dog.”
“Rocky was the dog you had as a little boy?” Maye asked.
“No, no, no, nooooo,” John said, shaking his head somewhat sloppily. “He’s the dog I have now, a boxer. She breeds them out on that old farm she lives on. All alone. Not a friend in the world.”
“Really?” Maye said as she took the chocolate-glazed donut with rainbow sprinkles out of John’s limp, intoxicated fingers. “Really. Now drink your coffee, John. Drink it all up.”
10
No Promises, No Demands
“O kay, Mickey,” Maye coaxed as Gwen looked on. “Are you ready?”
Mickey looked at Maye with his soft brown eyes and thought, I don’t need to be playing a piano. I’m a dog. I should be messing with my nu-nu.