So between the holy heavenly kiss from Charlie, my glorious new eye-for-an-eye plans, and for once, being where I’m supposed to be when I’m supposed to be, I’m feeling pretty dang cocky by the time #1 on my SHIT LIST stomps up our front porch steps. I am a big believer in the famous saying “Know thy enemy”—I got it in a fortune cookie from Men Hong Low Chinese Restaurant on Lisbon Ave., which has excellent chicken chop suey, by the way—so I 100% knew Gert would show up to check on us and I’m BE PREPARED.
I got the look on my face that the kid in Old Yeller gets on his when his dog gets rabies and he’s got to shoot him when I answer her meaty knock on the front door. “Good afternoon, Missus Klement. Gosh, I was so heartily sorry to hear about Mister Peterman. I hope his funeral went as planned.”
Those black painted-on eyebrows of hers inch up to the edge of her bone-colored hair when she grins with her fake teeth that she keeps in a glass next to her bed and says, like she’s just so sure she’s got me by the short hairs, “And how did you know that I attended the service if you stayed here in the house as you were supposed to, Theresa Marie?”
Geez, maybe listening to Father Joe’s droning grave sermon about the valley of death did make her arteries go as hard as her heart, because she wouldn’t have asked that question if she was thinking straight. Usually Gert is much wilier than that.
“When Birdie and me paid our respects to Mister Peterman from our back porch,” I tell her, still looking very hang-dog, “we saw you standing next to Mrs. Peterman at the grave. Black really suits you, by the way.”
When our enemy gets done harrumphing, still very certain that she’s caught us up to no good, she slyly says, “I came by earlier today, you and your sister must have heard me.” We sure did, you Holy Water–wielding, Dominos vobiscum–ing, exercising-the-devil battle-ax. “If you were home and not out gallivanting, why didn’t you answer the back door?”
Before I can answer, my sister, who is sucking the last drop of chocolate out of one of the Hershey’s kisses I awarded her from my secret stash in the umbrella stand—for some unknown reason, old-fashioned Birdie is a faster runner than weird Birdie and she actually beat me in the race home when she saw Gert’s car coming down Keefe Ave.—calls over from the sofa, “Hi, Missus Klement! We’re so sorry we missed you this morning. We were probably down in the basement doing wash. Our machine hasn’t been working right, so we can’t hear anything when the clothes are spinnin’ around, can we, Theresa Marie?”
I almost give myself whiplash when I jerk my head toward her and say, “Ahhh . . . no, we sure can’t, Robin Jean.”
Holy Jesus with a twist!
The kid who can’t even remember to tinkle half the time or her address or how much her mother despises Ida Lupino just came up with almost the same gorgeous lie I was going to tell Gert! (I am definitely doing that ESP test on her tonight.)
“Did you need something else, Missus Klement?” I say, so very dutifully. “Because I really need to . . .” I bring out the feather duster that I’ve been holding behind my back, but then, like I just remembered something, I hit myself on the forehead and get ready to tell her the fib that, if I do say so myself, Mr. Howard Howard could sell in his precious gems and jewelry store in the fancy case. This fib is 24k. “Goodness gracious, I was so involved in my chores and praying that I almost forgot to give you a very important message!” Just in case her best friend didn’t pull Louise to the side over at the funeral and remind her about the meeting tonight, this next bit should take care of that problem. “Our dear, very punctual mother, who works her fingers to the bone and will make such an excellent new treasurer of the Pagan Baby Society, was in such a hurry this morning to start her new job that she asked me to ask you when you came by to check on us if you’d call her this afternoon at the Clark station to let her know what dessert you’d like her to bring tonight.” (Ever since Louise was the one and only suspect in THE CASE OF THE TROTS, she’s only allowed to bring a sure thing to the Thursday meeting. So all of them gals don’t have to stop doing what they’re doing and run to the little girls’ room every five minutes to deal with diarrhea, she needs to pick up a safe and scrumptious treat from Meuer’s Bakery.) “So, could you please do that?”
My Moriarty, Kryptonite, and Ming the Merciless all rolled into one nods, but then gives me the worst watery evil eye, because she was so sure she caught us doing some shenanigans and she doesn’t like being thwarted any more than I do. But believe you me, I know her, she won’t give up without a fight. (Unfortunately, we have this in common.) She’s still hoping to catch Birdie and me doing something, anything that she can tattle to Louise about when she calls her at work before she stomps off our front porch in a huff.
And sure enough, with another perfectly white, sneering grin—swear to God, next time I sneak into her house, I’m gonna steal those teeth—she asks me, “Did you go to confession today?”
“She certainly did go to confession today, Missus Klement!” Birdie shouts from the sofa. “You can even check with Jenny Radtke. And for the rest of the afternoon, when you come to check on us, if we don’t answer the door”—Birdie magically makes her blue rosary appear in her little hands—“it’s because we’ll be in our bedroom doing more praying, isn’t that right, Theresa Marie?”
Of course, I am feeling very proud and impressed by Birdie’s excellent lies under fire, but I don’t let that show when I tell Mrs. Klement to her face that’s growing redder by the minute, which I heard is a sign of a stroke, so here’s hoping, “That’s absolutely right, Robin Jean.” And as long as our neighbor is here darkening our door . . . this is such a long shot, but what do I have to lose? “And one of the people we’ll be praying for all afternoon is Sister Margaret Mary, because we’ve been in the house all day and haven’t heard one way or another if she’s been found.” Of course, Gert, being such a big-deal muckety-muck around here, she must’ve found out at the funeral that our principal still hasn’t shown up, so I bet she also knows what was in the note the nun left that probably explains what happened to her. “If she hasn’t turned up yet, does anybody have any idea where Sister might be? Robin Jean and me are so worried about her.”
I thought Gert might show off and spill the beans, because she doesn’t know about Kitten’s dare, but after she gives me one more disgusting look, she makes her way over to her house muttering “banshee” and “eternal damnation.”
And I, not slowly at all, rush to my sister’s side to ask her how in the heck she came up with that great half fib about our loud washing machine that really does spin out of control so bad that it can chase Birdie and me halfway across the basement and corner us near the furnace.
“Honey!” I tell her. “I’m so proud of you. How in the heck did you think—?”
“Can I please see the evidence I found behind Mister Gilgood’s mausoleum?” she says.
Still so impressed by her slick fibs, I don’t question why she’s in such a hurry to take a look at the St. Christopher medal, I just reach into my shorts pocket and hand it over to her.
“Now that we know for sure that Mister McGinty didn’t kidnap and murder Sister Margaret Mary,” Birdie says more soulfully than Mr. James Brown, “we need to take his medal back to him soon as we can. He must miss it so much.”
She’s right, of course, but we can’t do that until Gert leaves for the Pagan Baby meeting. We snuck past her once today, so the odds aren’t good that we’ll be able to do it again. And considering the daring deep water that this nonswimmer is in, The Mutual Admiration Society really should spend all of tonight sleuthing and snooping around the neighborhood under the cover of darkness to try and find news about Sister Margaret Mary instead of climbing the fence to Holy Cross.
On the other hand . . . if we don’t go visit Mr. McGinty tonight, I’d be breaking the sister-promise I made to Birdie this afternoon when I still thought he was a kidnapping murderer and I wanted her to go, Bird, go and she wanted to stay and talk to him some more, and I can’t do tha
t. Besides, I owe it to the poor guy whose holy lucky charm I’ve kept from him most of the day, and I owe it to myself, too. Suspecting that this old basketball-playing friend of Daddy’s, my fishing pal, a wounded veteran of the war, teacher of whittling and bird-watching to Charlie, our godfather, who has been taking such extra special care of my sister and me since we lost Daddy, was a horrible criminal all day has really taken a toll on me.
Maybe we should divide the difference. Go see the caretaker the first hour we have free tonight when Louise and Gert are at the meeting, and for the second hour, The Mutual Admiration Society will start working on the dare. Tomorrow afternoon, that’s when we’ll really ramp up looking for information about Sister Margaret Mary. During the hours Louise is busy staring at her reflection in the Clark station’s front window, Birdie and me can easily sneak out of the house to meet up with Charlie, because wretched Gert will not be around then, either, to keep us under her thumb. She’ll spend the whole afternoon proving to everyone in the parish that there’s nobody nearer to God than she by doing what she does every Friday afternoon starting at 1:00 p.m. She’ll help the nuns at St. Kate’s prepare for the fish fry in the school cafeteria with a more martyred look than St. Sebastian, who died from a very bad arrow attack followed by a clubbing to death, which, in my opinion, is a very good example of the famous saying—“Overkill.” (Joke!)
Yes, that’s a pretty decent plan, but I can’t explain it to Birdie right now because working too far into the future confuses her, so I just tell her the part that will really excite her. “We can’t go over to the cemetery right now, honey, because you-know-who’s watchin’ our every move, but after Gert leaves for her meeting tonight, just like I sister-promised you this morning, we’ll go visit Mister McGinty and give him his medal back and you can talk to him and drink Graf’s root beer and eat windmill cookies and . . . and pet Pyewacket, won’t that be fun?”
I can’t tell the caretaker how we hung on to his medal all day as evidence against him, because that would hurt his feelings, but, never fear, I already got another BE PREPARED plan that I’m 75% sure will work.
’Cause I can’t trust my sister not to blurt something dumb out to Mr. McGinty, something like the truth, I’ll have to wait until she gets some cookies and soda into her and gets busy purring along with Pye—they will take a trip to parts unknown together, they always do—then she won’t be around anymore to deny the story I’m going to tell him after I take his medal out of my pocket and place it down in front of him. When he cries out Praise be! I’ve been looking everywhere for it! Where did you find it?, because I feel so wretched for thinking the worst of him, I won’t even have to put on one of my pretend-sad looks when I answer him: So sorry, Mister McGinty. I found it in Birdie’s shorts pocket. She must’ve come across it this morning in the cemetery and picked it up, because you know how she can’t resist anything shiny, and then she forgot all about it, because of her horrible memory, ya know? Please forgive her for she knows not what she does. And hey, by the way, why are Sister Margaret Mary’s initials on the back of it?
Being extra religious, our friend will especially like me using the famous saying that will remind him how Jesus asked His Heavenly Father to forgive the people who nailed His Kid to the cross, which was pretty damn All-Big of Him, if ya ask me. (Anybody crucified me or my sister or Charlie or my grandparents or Gracie Carver or a couple other people around here that I really like, believe me, they would be #1 on my SHIT LIST for all of eternity.)
“That plan sound good to you?” I ask my sister.
“What plan?” she says as she hops off the sofa and turns on the Motorola in such a goofy way that it’s hard to believe that just minutes ago the kid told the smartest washing-machine and rosary-praying lies to Gert, but that’s just the way she is. Unpredictable. Forgetful. With a tummy that never feels full. “I’m getting really, really, really, really hungry again, Tessie. Do we have any Velveeta?”
“Sorry, honey, we’re out.” Not only of cheese, but a lot of other stuff, too. Old Mother Hubbard would feel right at home in our pantry. “Don’t you have any of the chocolate cherries left?”
She points to her protruding tummy and then down to the green shag carpet. The Stover box has been picked clean, which explains why the kid who always feels so much better when she knows where her next meal is coming from licks her lips and says, “Can I have my TV dinner now?”
Seeing my sister sitting there with her shorter bangs that Charlie cut for her sticking straight up in the air and beggar dirty while she waits for the Motorola’s picture tube to warm up, I realize that we don’t only have to clean up the house, we gotta clean up ourselves, too. After running and rolling around and sneaking and crawling and digging through leaf piles on this hot Indian summer day, the both of us are looking like something the cat dragged in, and that’s not going to go over real big with Louise when she gets home tonight from her meeting. Once she gets a whiff of us, believe me, she will not get a nose-full of sugar and spice and everything nice. She’ll figure out that we been out and about and up to no good.
“Tell ya what,” I say to Birdie. “After I straighten up the house a little, let’s take a bath and put on our spy clothes for tonight’s trip to see Mister McGinty and then I’ll stick your TV dinner in the oven.” She adores bubble baths, so I’m sure she’ll go for this idea. “You can finish watchin’ . . .”—I turn around to check what show is beginning to show up on the TV screen, “American Bandstand”—“but the second it’s over, you come right upstairs and get in the tub.”
“Roger that, Tessie,” she says with one of her irresistible smiles. “Now get outta the way, you’re blocking Mister Dick Clark.”
After I run the garbage out to the silver can—Gert’s on her back porch, rocking away and watching our house like a guard waiting to catch escaping prisoners—I finish dusting and running the sweeper across the carpet, and peek in on Birdie to make sure she’s where I left her, then I head upstairs to run the tub water. I squeeze in a few squirts of Joy soap to get it nice and frothy, and hurry into our bedroom to pick out what our mother has started calling “ensembles” out of the little dresser she wedged into our closet.
I’ve got to dig deep to find two mostly clean sets of navy T-shirts and shorts to wear on our trip over to Mr. McGinty’s shack tonight and the snooping around we got to do for the dare, so I’m down at the very bottom of the bottom dresser drawer when my hand bumps into something sitting under the white paper Louise put in there with thumbtacks that are long gone.
“Goddamnit all, Bird!” I say, because I’m sure this giant lump must be covering up some food that she hid away for a rainy day and, of course, forgot all about. I’ve come across some very disgusting things growing here and there throughout the house and considering how bad a state my tummy is already in because of Kitten’s dare, I don’t want to feast my eyes on whatever leftovers Birdie stuck under the dresser paper, but what choice do I have? Who knows how long whatever she buried under here has been multiplying? We could wake up to The Blob breathing down our necks one of these nights.
So I push the clothes to one side of the drawer, breathe through my mouth, warn my gut that it’s about to get some bad news, and slowly lift up the corner of the paper with the tips of my fingers. Sure enough, the wad is big and green and . . . and the worst horrifying, revolting Gotcha! next to the time I found the dripping, bloody cow’s brains that Daddy put under our bed on Beggars Night last year, that I’m pretty positive I’m gonna throw up! And when I get done doing that, I will reach into my back pocket, take out my stubby pencil and my TO-DO list, and draw a line through #4. Catch whoever stole over $200 out of the Pagan Baby collection box.
Q. The culprit that I, and everyone else in the parish, have been looking high and low for, is not Skip Abernathy, but my very own sister?!
A. Signs point to yes.
Damnation!
Why . . . why . . . why . . . why . . . would she . . . ?
Wait just
a cotton-pickin’ minute.
Could this stack of cash . . . could it be one of Birdie’s special gifts?
But it’s not fluffy like the feathers she lays around Daddy’s tombstone, and it isn’t shiny like the ring with the pink, heart-shaped stone she rested against Louise’s plate this morning, and the new nickel I found under my pillow when I was waiting for her to wake up so I could tell her about the great-good-luck murder. And they keep this dough in the collection box at church, so she didn’t find it lying on the ground like she did those gifts. No, as hard as it is for me to believe, I’m 100% sure that Birdie stole these greenbacks right out from under St. Kate’s nose.
Damnation times ten!
“Tessie?” My sister isn’t calling to me from the living room, but the bathroom down the hall, so “American Bandstand” must be over. “I’m getting in the tub now just like you told me to and yes, I turned off the water.”
I can’t let her know that I stumbled across the worst piece of evidence that could get her sent away, not to jail, but to a “home,” because she is an innocent who cannot be held responsible for what she does, so I steady my voice and call back to her, “Did you remember to take off all your clothes including your undies, honey?”
“Yes, I remembered to take off all my clothes including my undies, honey.”
The poor kid couldn’t have known what she was doing when she took the money from the church box, and she’s probably already forgotten that she did. I’m not sure that she even has a conscience—that annoying, chirping voice might be located in the part of Birdie’s brain that she didn’t get because she came out of Louise too early—but what I do know is that no matter how hard I try to hide it, my sister, who I love and know best of all and who loves and knows me best of all, is gonna figure out how scared I am if I run into the bathroom and present this stolen wad of bills to her and tell her what she’s done. Her eyes will bulge bigger and then her little face will crumple and she’ll start flapping her arms and squawking and yelling with her big opera lungs how sorry she is over and over and over and over and then she’ll ask if I still love her so many times that I almost don’t anymore and . . . and Gert won’t even need to turn on her powerful hearing aids to know that it’s time to call Louise, who I’m pretty positive would send my little sister away to the loony bin if she finds out what Birdie’s done, which she won’t, if I have anything to say about it.